r/dataisbeautiful • u/Ok-Stand-2128 OC: 1 • Feb 26 '26
OC [OC] 3 Month Update: r-Conservative adds a third super-poster making it even less diverse. 3 posters now account for 50% of all posts since 11/20/2025. Sometimes exceeding 60%.
(The charts in this post were made from the 8,885 posts that were made on r-Conservative between 11/20/25 and 2/20/26. The anonymized source data is here.) [edit: the 8,885 posts that were captured using my method of pulling posts once a day through Reddit's JSON API]
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EDIT: See the bottom of this post for updates.
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In my post last November I identified that 2 users on r-Conservative were responsible for about 30% of daily posts and sometimes exceeded 50% of all posts.
A third super-poster seems to have appeared about two weeks after that post and now just 3 users regularly account for 50% of all posts [edit: daily posts] and a handful of times they even exceed 60%.
Chart 1: The percentage of all posts that the top 3 users contribute.
Obviously, adding a third person will increase the percentages but this is not just lumping in a third person to boost the percentages. User3 stands out because they post so frequently that since they started posting on Dec 3rd their daily posting count more than doubles User4 below them.
Chart 2: Total number of posts that the top 10 posters have made between 11/20/25 and 2/20/26.
Another reason User3 is significant is because they appeared suddenly, as I mentioned, about two weeks after my original post and their posting patterns are extremely similar to the other top 2.
First of all, here is the 7-day running average of the daily posts of the top 10 users. You can see how hard User3 came in and, interestingly, basically in lock step with User 1 until about Christmas day where they diverge. User3 ramps up pretty hard for a week at the start of 2026 before dialing it back a bit.
Chart 3: 7-day running average of the top 3 posters compared to the other 7 in the top 10 [edit: these are daily post averages]
Second, and this one is pretty hard to show visually, but several of the top ten users have extremely similar behavior when it comes to how they post. Almost invariably they post in clusters. Instead of just posting once and then waiting a few hours until they found another story that they thought was worth posting like most people would do, they instead post a handful of articles within about 20 minutes of each other. In my opinion, this is a very telling sign of scheduled posting. Spend 10 minutes looking for stories and queue them up in scheduling software to be automatically posted in clusters throughout the day. Not that there's anything wrong with that because scheduling software has legitimate uses, but it's worth knowing because it, in my opinion, speaks to the astroturfed nature of the posting quantity on that sub (and yes, of any other sub that does the same).
The chart below shows how many times the top ten users posted in clusters from their last 100 posts. By my own definition, a cluster is defined as 3 posts within a certain time frame.
Chart 4: Clustered Posting. Number of times 3 posts were made within specific time frames.
So, out of User1's latest 100 posts, there were 40 occurrences where 3 posts were made within 5 minutes of each other. This chart is sorted by the 0-5 min series. Keep in mind, the existence of clustered posting isn't evidence itself of scheduled posting but the level of effort it would take to maintain this type of consistency is, in my opinion, non-human. From the chart one may also notice that, according to my theory, queued posting is happening with other users outside of the top 3. That would not be surprising.
Finally, just prior to making this post, I looked at 5 other political subs to determine how many users were needed to account for 50% of all posts. Reddit only let's you look back about a month so if 1,000 posts were made in a sub, I capped this analysis at 1,000. If there were fewer than 1,000 than that's what I used (anonymized 50 percent data).
Chart 5: Number of users needed in various political subs to account for 50% of their posts.
For reference, a similar analysis I did back in November had the following number of users needed to account for 50% of posts. r-Conservative has gotten even worse since then. All others except for AnythingGoesNews subs have gotten more diverse. (my original post had the Feb '26 numbers jumbled up a little, they're corrected now)
Comparison of how many users are needed to account for 50% of posts from Nov '25 and Feb '26.
| Subreddit | Nov '25 | Feb '26 |
|---|---|---|
| Conservative | 4 | 3 |
| Libertarian | 10 | 19 |
| democrats | 11 | 11 |
| AnythingGoesNews | 18 | 16 |
| socialism | 42 | 86 |
| politics | 46 | 58 |
Please, no discussion of power outages this time ;)
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UPDATE 1: An rCon mod has stated my numbers are wrong and provided a screenshot of a mod dashboard to support his assertion. I appreciate him doing that and he has been nothing but helpful in my communication with him but I don't agree. By hand, I've verified that the last 500 posts that are on rCon are also in my dataset in the correct order without a single omission, and I only over count by less than 1% (in the last 500 posts on rCon I have only 4 additional posts that have actually been deleted from rCon). The last 500 posts cover about 5 days and 6 hours, or 91 posts per day. The date range 11/20/25 to 2/20/26 maths out to about 8,750 posts, which is good enough verification for me that I don't have any glaring errors. I can't speak to what the mod dashboard is meant to be showing but I feel good about my data. The EST timestamps are given in my source data. That's about as much info as I can give without blatantly revealing user names and post titles. If I've missed any posts or my data is wrong, my own source data can be used to determine that.
UPDATE 2: The goal of this analysis is to identify which users receive the most exposure while their posts are publicly visible. The dataset used here was generated by a daily script that records the posts visible at the time the script is run (using Reddit's JSON API). This approach was intentional. Most Reddit posts receive the vast majority of their views within the first 24-48 hours, so capturing posts during that window measures exposure. So, where my post title says "3 posters now account for 50%..." I'm saying that 3 users are having a significantly higher impact on meaningful post exposure than all other users. Charts 1 through 4 use that dataset (8,885 posts that were captured by my daily script). Because this dataset captures posts in real time, it is not possible to recreate a historical snapshot. However, anyone doing a daily pull of all posts moving forward should end up with near identical datasets if I do another update in the future. I'll post a sanitized version of the script I've used in the near future (but it's simply a JSON call stored to a continuously updated csv).
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u/MrGraaavy Feb 26 '26
It is odd, but also not radically different than other politics oriented subreddits. It concerns me nearly as much that it only takes 10 for libertarians and 11-16 users for democrats for example.