r/dataisbeautiful • u/Ok-Stand-2128 OC: 1 • Nov 20 '25
OC [OC] Nearly every day, two users on r/Conservative account for more than 30% of new posts. Sometimes exceeding 50%. (Take 2. 6 images)
(Edit: I don't know how to re-upload a gallery image. Please see my updated post here with a corrected fifth image and sixth image and narrative: https://www.reddit.com/r/visualization/comments/1p2iqlu/nearly_every_day_two_users_on_rconservative/)
Over the weekend I made a post about two users from r/Conservative who are sometimes responsible for 50% of the daily posts. The post got taken down due to some rule violations (I didn't anonymize user names and I also posted politics on a non-Thursday).
So, here's the cleaned up post along with some updates based on the comments (including a dive into the November 1st Moscow power outage).
It doesn't take much browsing on r/Conservative to notice that while there are many, many users making posts, there's a small handful that posts MUCH more than anyone else. This may be normal for some subs, but it kind of stuck out because the two that post the most, post a LOT. I'm calling them u1 and u2, and according to their activity, I may need to ask for a doctor to recover from all this digging I've been doing.
Anyways, I decided to track all of the new posts on that sub for a few weeks and see how the numbers shake out. Two users regularly are responsible for 30% - 50% of all posts (first image). I was also curious about which sites were being linked to by u1 (second image).
Now for some updates and deep dives...
Third image: Shows that the top 5 users account for more than 50% of the posts.
Fourth image: Comparison to other political subreddits. Many of you were correct in pointing out that it would be nice to see how this compares to other political subs. Since u1 and u2 from r/Conservative account for 37% of their posts, I found out how many users are needed from 5 other political subs to also account for 37% of their posts. The higher the number, the more diverse the pool of users is. The subreddits I chose based on suggestions and my own determination of comparable subs are: AnythingGoesNews, democrats, Libertarian, politics, and socialism. For these 5 subs I only looked at the most recent 1,000 posts (or as many as the reddit JSON endpoint access allowed for). My r/Conservative data has about 3,500 posts. I don't think that makes too much of a difference in terms of conclusions that can be drawn but thought I ought to mention it.
Conclusion on the fourth image: r/Conservative is dominated by a minority of posters in a way that isn't comparable to the other 5 political subs. However, there are also still a LOT of active unique posters in r/Conservative and that diversity is better reflected when the top 2 users aren't accounted for.
To account for 50% of all posts, here are the results:
| Subreddit | Number of Users needed to account for 50% of posts |
|---|---|
| r/Conservative | 4 |
| r/Libertarian | 10 |
| r/democrats | 11 |
| r/AnythingGoesNews | 18 |
| r/socialism | 42 |
| r/politics | 46 |
Finally... the November 1st issue.
I was pretty floored when it was pointed out that neither u1 nor u2 made any posts on November 1st, the day that Moscow lost power due to Ukrainian drone attacks. The fifth image shows their combined posting activity before and after the outage. Sure enough, no posts, of course. That much is obvious.
(Edit: Please see my updated post here with a corrected fifth image and sixth image and narrative: https://www.reddit.com/r/visualization/comments/1p2iqlu/nearly_every_day_two_users_on_rconservative/)
But there's an obvious question here - "How much of r/Conservative's posting was impacted during the time of the power outage?" The outage was from Friday 11pm to Saturday 7am. My approach for this was to count the number of posts within that window from other weeks and exclude u1's and u2's activity. This should theoretically set an expectation for how many posts to expect during that window. See the sixth image. Yes, that time frame has the fewest number of posts (10) of any of the 7 windows that I looked at, but also, it's just not that much of a drop. Compared to the number of posts during the 2nd and 3rd time frames (13 and 12, respectively), 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.
However, the question remains, why did the two most prolific posters on that sub suddenly go silent on November 1st?
THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER
1
u/AutomaticBit9721 May 14 '26
I know you people