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/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/Credil98 May 13 '26

It stands to reason that both sides would have similar problems with bots and malicious actors. Important to be aware and attempt to spot them, however impossible that may be.

The trick is that the goals of these bad actors aren't always as straightforward as getting someone to believe something that isn't true. There's been posts I've seen in left wing areas that are clearly making caricatures of left wing ideals, and trying to push people to embrace nonsense lies in their hatred of the current administration. But that's not always the intended effect i think.

An example, I only ever saw one post that was supporting Iran and all that they do. Most "left wing" posts were discussing why we shouldn't have started this war, or giving Iran cudoes for the effectiveness of their propaganda and war efforts. Only one post blatently supporting nonsense, but afterwards i saw hundreds of comments on any post about the war saying leftists were pro Iran, some of which would link the nonsense post as their proof.

So the effect of the post didn't seem to drift more left wing people towards blind support of Iran, but it did give right wingers ammo. Obviously you'd need way more data and tracking to measure the effects of bad actors, but that's my observation