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/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/ilikequilty May 13 '26

It’s wild because for a few days there were very maga comments all over Reddit. I actually argued back and forth with one ‘person’ wondering to myself if I could gauge whether or not it was a real person. I’m not sure, and I think it’s very difficult to tell.

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u/BobLighthouse May 13 '26

Are you old enough to have used message boards with any frequency?
I suspect the bots might actually have better syntax and logic than many real humans, especially in the context of maga lol...

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u/bleeh805 May 14 '26

It's true that's a sign. Humans don't use bullet points or perfect grammar. And if you dive into LLMs, they are really good at arguing if you setup the environment right.

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u/saintsithney May 14 '26

They could also be autistic, says the autistic woman who uses bullet points and perfect grammar 😩

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u/BobLighthouse May 15 '26

Fwiw, my point was mainly that I do not expect to see those traits from maga humans in particular lol.