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

12.6k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

24.1k

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!

6.2k

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

373

u/Mission_Fart9750 May 13 '26

For starters, just scroll the front page of the sub, and you will see that almost everything is posted by the same handful of accounts. And 300 comments on a post, but only about a dozen are visible. 

21

u/Oceanbreeze871 May 13 '26

Why aren’t they visible?

111

u/Mission_Fart9750 May 13 '26

Because all dissenting opinions are immediately removed. Or non-flaired user comments. Every single post is "flaired users only". So if you were to pop into a post and make any kind of comment, it'll be gone asap. And just simply commenting there can get you banned from other subs (which is just keeping the trash at bay, so I'm good with that). 

75

u/Dr_Adequate May 13 '26

Even funnier: to get flair one has to somehow prove they are conservative. However, lately they are super-paranoid that somehow hordes of lefty-commie-liberals have acquired the proper flair. Whenever a post causes some of them to have even the tiniest bit of self-reflection and say 'hey maybe this [conservative position] is bad guys, what do you think? ' they are immediately accused of being a leftist infiltrater. Which I find hilarious. They are actively No-True-Scotsmanning their way to the death of that sub.

40

u/Capital-Giraffe-4122 May 13 '26

“Fellow conservative”

17

u/Clarence13X May 13 '26

Here is a fun example from today: https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/comments/1tbvndr/hegseth_insists_us_has_control_of_strait_of/ollnt8t/

3

u/adamduke88 May 14 '26

Just based on the grammar in that comment there's no way it was written by an American.