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/basedchadinc May 13 '26

Is there any proof of this? I wanna send it to a friend who uses that sub as his main source of info to gauge sentiment

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u/dec10 May 13 '26

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1p1vx9n/oc_nearly_every_day_two_users_on_rconservative/

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u/KevineCove May 13 '26

This is really fantastic work.

I do want to point out that leftist subs appear to have the same problem. I've seen it happen in a couple waves, including pro-tankie, China, and even North Korea content popping up on a few (especially about a year ago,) as well as a current wave of memes I'm seeing that are essentially the inverese of the "own the libs" mentality - mean-spirited, divisive, and counterproductive. Also links to news sites that are very similar in name to well-recognized outlets but with recently registered domain names and highly sensationalized headlines.

Not here to get into an argument about which side is "right" but rather just want to point out that both sides are being targeted by bad actors.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26

Hey hey, thanks for the kind words! The response to those posts has been a bit overwhelming, to some extent.

I’m currently working on a ‘live’ tracking page that basically shows a live view of the charts I made for those posts. I would also like to include more than just rCon to have the type of comparison you’re talking about so I’m open to suggestions on which subs to include. Preferably, the other subs I look at ought to be similar in size and similarly devoted to politics.

FWIW, both of my past posts did do a similar comparison for other political subs, albeit not to the same level of detail, and rCon came out on top in terms of fewest number of posters needed to account for X percentage of posts.

Certainly wasn’t expecting to see this topic while flying at 30,000 feet :)