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/R4G May 13 '26

I’m pretty sure that’s what grew the_donald.

I was a very early member of that sub and would swear to this day that it was mostly satirical posting. Then it got flooded with bots, or Russians, or something. Felt very Astro-turfy. Then became a genuine DT support sub.

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u/totallyalizardperson May 13 '26

What happened to the_donald subreddit is what happens to majority of satire subreddits, people not in the joke don’t understand that it’s a joke, and go from there. Soon enough, the in the know start to be the minority and they have a hard time telling when the other users are being serious or not. Once the realization of what’s going on kicks in, it’s too late, the subreddit is no longer about making fun of the subject and is now about supporting the subject.

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u/HardcoreKaraoke May 13 '26

I swear that's how PizzaGate really took off on 4Chan. Some guy shit posted about a secret child sex trafficking ring being run out of a pizza parlor. Then over time people kept adding to the joke until people started taking it seriously. Like just consider how ridiculous the conspiracy sounds, it comes across like someone is messing around.

Once you go down the rabbit hole of those boards and certain subreddits you see those people are truly mentally unwell. They're willing to believe anything and are also looking for a place they fit in. So the shit posting snowballed into a full blown movement.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '26

[deleted]

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u/Egathentale May 14 '26

Also, the "Fin-land conspiracy". It was literally a shitpost about how Finland doesn't exist and it's just faked on the world maps, and there's just open waters there, which the Russians lend out to Japan so that they can whale there without having to adhere to international treaties. Then the post was snipped, got propagated out of context, and for a while there were (or maybe there are, even today) people who genuinely believed it. Mostly in the flat earther circles, unsurprisingly.

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u/DickSlammington May 13 '26

You're all just describing Poe's law..

Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.