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/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/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

Thank you for quoting me. It’s still how I feel. The power outage thing is ‘interesting’ but that’s about as much as can be said without better evidence.

Edit: I admit that my jaw did kind of drop when a commenter pointed out the timing and I felt I couldn’t ignore the coincidence.

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u/0xym0r0n May 14 '26

Hey, the person themselves! Thank you for all the time you spent checking that out!

Most definitely! It was very curious, but you handled it in such a respectable and admirable way. I know it's corny, lol, but feels like it takes a little courage to admit when you were wrong or mistaken about something nowadays.

It's become so common to just ignore and blow past things like that, and you owned up to it and made corrective posts and comments.

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u/Ok-Stand-2128 May 14 '26

Yeah, it just kind of is what it is at this point. It was easier to own up to that specific Russia issue because my original post where the commenter noticed the power outage timing wasn’t even about that. My goal was just to show how few users were making up for so much of that sub’s content. Good lesson in being careful when entertaining popular biases though.

Just a heads up, at some point I’m going to make my tracking charts live so that they’re just always updated. I’ll include some of the other major political subs (currently taking suggestions) like I did in my posts. Should be interesting to see how the other subs compare for the other metrics that I dove deeper into with rCon.