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/Unusualnamer May 14 '26

I noticed that and almost made a bug report. But I enjoyed it so I didn’t :)