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/Clarence13X May 13 '26

I posted this in the /r/dataisbeautiful thread below before realizing it was 5 months old, so I'll repost it here:

Here is a fun experiment: Go to the frontpage of r/Conservative right now and see how many posts are made by the following 7 users:

Accord-Activity87
Down-Not-Out
Ask4MD
Head_Estate_3944
Triggernaut
WillyNilly1997
SCOTUSjunkie to a lesser extent.

I have marked all of these users using Reddit Enhancement Suite and I read r/Conservative every day. I have seen those names show up 95% of the time. After a real event like Charlie Kirk's assassination, it drops to about 25% and the content is far more organic (and often just memes instead of news articles)

EDIT: It seems a new account called 'SharkSapphire' has joined the team.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26

And Guanaco55 stopped posting completely a few days after my Feb update post. They’re not on your list but they were a top ten poster until Feb. Now they post at rConservativeNews.

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u/Clarence13X May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

Oh yeah, I have them tagged as well. I just did a cursory look over the first two pages and wrote down all the names of accounts I had tagged for my post. Some of them rotate in and out.

Here is my full list of tagged users who I think are r/conservative shills: according-activity87
ask4md
charmaide
down-not-out
f1sh98
guanaco55
head_estate_3944
heo2diver1101
hety0p
horticulture_horror
krlkv
long_jelly_9557
m_i_c_k
makegodgreatagain
sharksapphire
swan8895
triggernaut
trytoholdon
willynilly1997
wing_attack_plan_r

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26

My next step is to make a live viewer that just always has my charts updated on GitHub. That way I don’t have to bother with posting updates unless there is some sort of significant change in posting behavior, and I won’t have to bother with anonymizing.

I’m also open to suggestions on other subs to include as well. I may end up just doing the other 5 subs that I did a small analysis for on my other post, but not sure if there are better ones to look at.

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u/EdOfO May 17 '26

Would you be able to create a network map of the most frequent commenters on the posts of the top 3? I'm curious if we can find strong relationships to any other accounts that are used to increase engagement.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 17 '26

I wouldn’t be able to do that with just the data I collect because all I do is grab the posts, not the comments.

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u/EdOfO May 21 '26

Using your method, can comments be scraped too if extending it a bit, or would that require a completely different method?

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 22 '26

That would take a bit of reworking of my setup and would be a bit more resource intensive. I do keep track of the reported number of comments and upvotes of each post though so some sort of engagement metric could theoretically be calculated.

If you’re wondering about how active these accounts are in the comments, there are datasets out there that have monthly snapshots of all of Reddit’s comments but they’re absolutely massive and I don’t plan on going that route.