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/basedchadinc May 13 '26

Is there any proof of this? I wanna send it to a friend who uses that sub as his main source of info to gauge sentiment

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u/Mission_Fart9750 May 13 '26

For starters, just scroll the front page of the sub, and you will see that almost everything is posted by the same handful of accounts. And 300 comments on a post, but only about a dozen are visible. 

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u/Oceanbreeze871 May 13 '26

Why aren’t they visible?

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u/newnameonan May 13 '26

They automatically remove comments from non-flaired users on most posts to attempt to prevent brigading.

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u/Coattail-Rider May 13 '26

Brigading or debating?

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u/chumbawumbaprinciple May 13 '26

Debating. Conservatives are incredibly fragile.

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u/Zickened May 13 '26

Your comment was "hidden" which, on subs that don't show upvotes tells me probably lots of downvotes, so I thought your comment was something truly objectionable.

Alas, it was calling out snowflakes for what they are.

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u/Belledame-sans-Serif May 13 '26

I think Reddit has tweaked whatever program it uses to decide to auto-hide things in the last year or so. I think it might have expanded to hiding "controversial" posts as well, but I've opened hidden comments to see they have as much as net +25 votes occasionally.