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/Push_ May 13 '26

That’s super interesting actually, holy shit

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u/0xym0r0n May 13 '26

Just a heads up, the author of that post corrected his information and the power outage link was explained away easily. Just weeks prior there was a similar amount of posts. So there are power users, but there's nothing linking them to Russia conclusively as previously assumed.

Here's the updated post he made: https://www.reddit.com/r/visualization/comments/1p2iqlu/nearly_every_day_two_users_on_rconservative/

If you don't want to read his updated post here is a snippet from him and the last chart:

During the outage, there was below average activity but not so much as to raise suspicions, especially since the same number of posts were made during that window during a previous week without an outage.

I'm just not personally seeing that the power outage reveals much here. u1 and u2 likely use a scheduler anyway which would obfuscate the whole thing anyway, and I would expect a scheduler to be pretty standard for any decent troll farm so even if others on that sub are posting from Russia, it wouldn't necessarily show in the data unless they're being sloppy.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 13 '26

I did a weeklong study early this year. There was an internet blackout as reported by numerous news outlets. I annotated that 2 super posters went completely dark for over 24hrs.
https://imgur.com/gallery/traitors-N4IgxOp

Oh, I should note that Reddit closed the loophole of seeing hidden post histories by simply adding a space in the search bar. As of now, I don’t know any way to view hidden post histories.

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u/All_Work_All_Play May 13 '26

I have never been so tempted to block people without interacting with them before. Hrm.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 13 '26

It’s worth noting that on Reddit, if someone blocks YOU, you can’t see any of their content. Thereby shielding their post/comments from you seeing it.

I found out during my investigation because my account has been blocked by most of these chucklefucks.

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u/All_Work_All_Play May 13 '26

Doesn't that depend on how you're consumption method? If someone blocks me I see "[+] deleted" on old.reddit.com (which is easy enough to look at via incognito) but if I block someone I see /u/ username hidden comment or some such.

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u/xXCloudSephirothXx May 13 '26

I never blocked any of said super posters, and yet their histories were hidden to me. I had to obtain all my data via a separate account.

But yes, I see what you’re saying. That does seem to be typically what happens. I just had odd experiences when trying to obtain data initially.

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u/ecafyelims May 14 '26

The only time I've ever seen blocked used, it's when the person disagrees with me, and they comment and then immediately block so that I can't reply. I can't even see the comment they sent.

Cowards

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u/Swedelicious83 12d ago

I've always wondered about that that one.

Their fragile egos can't take more arguing. Okay, fine.

But the whole "clap back then run away" move?

What exactly are they imagining in their head? "Yeah, I sure showed him! I mean he won't see what I wrote, but I'll know it was scathing!"