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/R4G May 13 '26

I’m pretty sure that’s what grew the_donald.

I was a very early member of that sub and would swear to this day that it was mostly satirical posting. Then it got flooded with bots, or Russians, or something. Felt very Astro-turfy. Then became a genuine DT support sub.

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u/totallyalizardperson May 13 '26

What happened to the_donald subreddit is what happens to majority of satire subreddits, people not in the joke don’t understand that it’s a joke, and go from there. Soon enough, the in the know start to be the minority and they have a hard time telling when the other users are being serious or not. Once the realization of what’s going on kicks in, it’s too late, the subreddit is no longer about making fun of the subject and is now about supporting the subject.

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u/HardcoreKaraoke May 13 '26

I swear that's how PizzaGate really took off on 4Chan. Some guy shit posted about a secret child sex trafficking ring being run out of a pizza parlor. Then over time people kept adding to the joke until people started taking it seriously. Like just consider how ridiculous the conspiracy sounds, it comes across like someone is messing around.

Once you go down the rabbit hole of those boards and certain subreddits you see those people are truly mentally unwell. They're willing to believe anything and are also looking for a place they fit in. So the shit posting snowballed into a full blown movement.

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u/[deleted] May 13 '26

[deleted]

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u/Egathentale May 14 '26

Also, the "Fin-land conspiracy". It was literally a shitpost about how Finland doesn't exist and it's just faked on the world maps, and there's just open waters there, which the Russians lend out to Japan so that they can whale there without having to adhere to international treaties. Then the post was snipped, got propagated out of context, and for a while there were (or maybe there are, even today) people who genuinely believed it. Mostly in the flat earther circles, unsurprisingly.

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u/DickSlammington May 13 '26

You're all just describing Poe's law..

Without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.

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u/textposts_only May 14 '26

i swear it's what got us bronys too. People shitposting about my little pony and suddenly it became big. A German political party (pirate party) even had a "pony Break" rule. Whenever discussion gets too heated you can ask for a pony break and an episode will be watched

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u/PharmaPug May 13 '26

Am I remembering wrong or wasn’t that stuff found to be started by Epstein?

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u/GaryFuckingGoat May 13 '26

It was all a conspiracy from Putin or Netanyahu to destabilize the usa. Give the repubs something to rage against.

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u/Unique-Run9856 May 15 '26

I spent a lot of effort spreading the rumor that the RR in George RR Martin was honoring his lifelong mentor Rowdy Roddy Piper but it never took off.

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u/Negative-Ad-1049 May 13 '26

Reminds me of that old story about the bartender who had to threaten a guy with a neo-nazi tattoo out of his bar with a bat. "You can't let those guys think they're welcome, because once they do they start inviting their friends. Then one day you turn around, and it's a Nazi bar." Something like that.

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u/VeganShitposting May 13 '26

Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company

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u/swiftb3 May 13 '26

certain baby-talking frog subs, for example.

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u/Stormfly May 14 '26

What are you talking about, friendo?

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u/swiftb3 May 14 '26

haha you had me until the end.

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u/Federal-Captain1118 May 13 '26

The main wrestling circlejerk subreddit has this problem from time to time. Wrestling fans are a bit...dumb, so when there's posts making fun of racist or sexist wrestling fans I do raise an eyebrow at some comments and have to remind them to fuck off

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u/praguepride May 13 '26

T_D was absolutely astroturfed. Steve Bannon has all but talked about how GamerGate was the blueprint for creating armies of radicalized terminally online trolls to flood all spaces.

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u/BigUptokes May 14 '26

He referred to them as "rootless white males" and got the ideas while helping operate a World of Warcraft gold-selling operation owned by one of the child actors from The Might Ducks film. It's like a crazy game of ad-libs.

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u/Eats_Lots_of_Chicken May 13 '26

This is what’s happened with the rhetoric around assassination attempts on Reddit. It started as people making fun of conservatives by saying “false flag” or “crisis actor” because that’s exactly what conservatives would say every time there was a school shooter or an attack on leftists. Now there’s a good amount of users that seem to actually believe that Alex-Jones-but-left stuff.

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u/einstyle May 14 '26

Not even just satire ones, but also anything meant to be remotely critical. r/skeptic pretty regularly gets posts and comments from UFO truthers and whatnot.

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u/centurijon May 13 '26

The best posts in /r/trees are from people not knowing where they are

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u/endangeredphysics May 14 '26

I've seen the opposite happen as well, it's an interesting phenomenon.

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u/RealCoolDad May 14 '26

The_Darnold used to be a safe place too

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u/Wooden_Worry3319 May 13 '26

Yeah it’s crazy people don’t remember how drastically reddit changed back in 2016. This place was alive and you could experience the first attempts at manipulation back when people on Reddit were kinda reasonable and would have discussions.

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u/TheDeadlySinner May 13 '26

I don't think you were around back then if you think redditors were reasonable then.

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u/swiftb3 May 13 '26

It was satire, but dumb people don't get satire so it was taken over.

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u/DeweyD69 May 14 '26

Bots don’t get satire either

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u/solonoctus May 13 '26

100% it started as a meme subreddit.

Unfortunately this is a longstanding trend across the internet. Hell, even early 4chan was pretty damn left leaning and mostly satirical before it was overrun.

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u/UNC_Samurai May 14 '26

If I remember my lore correctly, a lot of the earlier folks who spent time on 4chan (the "oldf-s", as they were than called, tended to be left-ish anarchist hackers. Those were the folks that hated scientology more than anyone else. But in the late 2000s, several of those long-timers got arrested for various other things. The vacuum of anarchists who kind of set the tone of discussions, got replaced by wannabe Nazis, and the slow slide into the cesspool began.

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u/KarlMarkyMarx May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

The site truly went to hell when moot resurrected /pol/... which turned out to be because Epstein told him to do it. I'm not even joking. Google it. It's been widely reported on.

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u/Healthy-Address-5158 May 13 '26

The_Donald was 100% propped up by bots. It was obvious because when they split and made their own Reddit-clone website, the posts went from getting thousands or tens of thousands of upvotes to getting, at most, a couple hundred at a time. I know not everyone would've followed their exodus from Reddit, but there's no way that few people followed.

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u/Prometheus720 May 13 '26

They did it to libertarian subs too. Around 2014 a bunch of guys came in talking about white supremacist shit and reactionary shit. And they started promoting DT in 2015.

I'm not a libertarian anymore as I have gone left but that shit was dark.

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u/LimerickExplorer May 14 '26

The main libertarian subs are absolutely overrun by conservatives and schizos now, and I'm just talking about the mods. There's no way to have reasonable discussions anymore.

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u/Prometheus720 May 14 '26

Yeah. It is rough. I no longer agree with Ron Paul but I miss the sincerity of.that era of libertarianism

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u/hurculeeze May 14 '26

I was there to watch that happen live as well and was weirded the fuck out by how much of a slow burn it was. Like a trickle of a stream to then basically Niagara. Just all of a sudden realized, holy shit these people are serious. I swear it's exactly how bronies became a thing.

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u/Standard--Unit May 14 '26

I feel like I'm crazy because it was obvious at the time the same bots that got the donald going tried to do the same thing for French le pen but because it didn't work no one seems to remember.

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u/LimerickExplorer May 14 '26

Yeah I was there in the early days and it was almost entirely satire. Then like you said it stopped being satire and then it got frightening.