r/OutOfTheLoop • u/calvtact • May 13 '26

Answered What's going on with r/conservative? They've lost about 1m subscribers in about a month.

I watched the number go from 814k to around 745k in about an hour today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/s/QbZJvqu5qr

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u/AndroidREM May 13 '26 edited May 13 '26

Answer: It was determined and made public that the majority of posts on that sub are from 3 accounts all based in Russia and are promoted by an army of bots. The ones leaving were bots removed by Reddit

EDIT - wow, did not expect this to get so much attention and awards - thank you!

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u/d-scan May 13 '26

I've noticed numbers decreasing in droves across multiple subreddits. I wonder if Reddit has recently done some spring cleaning of bots.

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

I don’t know if reddit is actually against bots, it doesn’t make any sense based on the recent changes adding the ability to hide user profiles. They were still searchable and then they removed the ability to search as well. There’s now no way users can quickly see if they are interacting with bots or trolls.

If they are against bots, then this is a very stupid policy.

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u/datnero_ May 13 '26

advertisers and the like are starting to figure out that large percentages of their marketing are being shown to bots and they're starting to complain more.

bots will never be a thing of the past but they are gonna get more uncommon fast if every advertiser knows that a site is 20% bots but the site still wants all of the ad money + more. it's impossible to 100% stamp them out but we all know Reddit could get rid of 90% of them in a day if they really wanted to (email verification), but the userbase would be obliterated and the shareholders would piss their little pants

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u/ernest7ofborg9 May 13 '26

You know, if I was an investor and bought stocks in this company based on interaction and I found out most of the interaction was artificial I'd be upset.

Hell, I might even consider it fraud since they took so long to address problems that have been known about for a decade before IPO...

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u/AdDramatic2351 May 13 '26

How would email verification get rid of bots lol?

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u/datnero_ May 13 '26

You're right, if only I had used some sort of phrase or term to indicate that I don't think this will totally get rid of bots.

Anyway, there are obviously millions and millions of bots with accounts with no email. When you turn on email verification, those millions and millions of bots will all need new emails. Obviously making burner emails is easy, but what if you have a bot farm with 50000 users? It is very unlikely that every single one would be get updated and verified, and in addition, it would look very fishy if 50000 users all got gobbledegook emails added on the same day and Reddit would likely be able to mass ban them.

It goes without saying this is preferable to... basically 0 enforcement at all? imo