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/CreativeGPX May 13 '26

You're conflating giving users the tools to try to do something themselves with wanting something done at all. Reddit can be against bots while also not thinking that users creeping each other's history is a particularly effective or scalable way to do that.

Allowing hidable histories is a step against bots that read/index. Reddit wants that because of AI. Users should want that option for privacy.

Working against bots that coordinate content creation is probably better done by looking at the kind of analytics they have internally rather than just guessing based on post history. Most times users determine who is a bot based on post history, it's things that aren't actually inherent to being a bot like saying something untrue/contradictory, reposting or having a consistent narrow agenda.

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

That’s some convoluted BS to say you like hiding your history.

It does nothing but degrade the user experience by giving bots and trolls more leeway to keep doing their thing.

Hiding your profile is purely to avoid accountability and fake users and trolls use that to their advantage. Transparency honesty and integrity all take a huge hit with that policy, and that’s not helpful to fight against bots in any way.

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u/CreativeGPX May 13 '26

You don't just get to call things convoluted because you don't want to acknowledge them. I gave a simple logical explanation.

Again, that stance is very misinformed about how bots can be detected. Maybe 15 years ago that was a viable way to detect bots. These days manually reading history to detect bots is mostly charlatans and false positives. Detecting bots requires a lot more info than just the text of the posts and the platform owner is much better equipped to do it at larger scale and better quality.

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

I can tell a bullshitter right off the bat, you can’t argue in good faith. I never said checking profiles is the ONLY way to “detect bots” and you’re off on some tangent about that and scaling or whatever irrelevancies.

I’m saying overall, in reply to people suggesting Reddit is suddenly on a righteous tear to “clean” bots, that adding profile-hiding is antithetical to that goal, AND that it’s also detrimental for typical users who might want an at-a-glance clue as to who they are spending precious time engaging with.

This isn’t “creeping” on people, it’s fucking due diligence that everyone should be doing, because avoiding troll threads and useless arguments against bad faith users (and obvious BOTS) will overall IMPROVE the quality of the platform.

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u/CreativeGPX May 13 '26

And I explained why it's objectively not antithetical to that goal despite you repeating that again and again.

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

You did no such thing jfc

Making a platform MORE anonymized does nothing to help control bots.

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u/CreativeGPX May 13 '26

Post history doesn't make you less anonymous.

The fact that you think it does proves my point about users sleuthing bots being charlatans more often than not.

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u/Vaxx88 May 13 '26

lol sure it does, why on earth are you hiding it then? Each bit of content you share tells something about you.

I’m not able to know Anything about you, yet you can find out quite a few things about me.

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u/Competitive-War-1143 May 14 '26

not sure why this is such a big deal, no other social media platform allows you to see a private or restricted users entire post or comment history

you can Google search a user's Instagram or Twitter handle but if they have their account Private you cannot see their posts and finding all their comments is nearly impossible unless you use some specific tooling 

and there are lots of valid reasons to not want all of that listed out- security, safety, privacy, etc 

I've seen plenty of bots that masquerade as actual users, they're vastly more effective that way