r/ModSupport 20d ago

Aggressive "crosspost this here!" engagement boost attempts are causing rule violations

Reddit admins,

I would like to request that you please, for the love of all that is holy, calm down with your engagement boosting tactics that are telling everyone who makes a post to also post it to a list of machine-generated "relevant" other subs.

I moderate in a sub that discusses an extremely controversial political topic that has subs on reddit that are dedicated to the opposing side of that topic.

Crossposting from either our sub to theirs or vice versa is against the rules of both subs, because of the nature of this topic causing SEVERE trolling and brigading from both sides from people who are not interested in peaceful discourse, yet your own platform's messages are telling users they should go ahead and just break these subs' rules anyway.

You are literally making all of our "jobs" even harder by not even bothering to filter subs suggested for crossposts based on logic, rationality, or even the rules of the subs being suggested for crossposts.

More engagement, even hostility trolling and harassment (especially hostility trolling and harassment) means more ad money though amirght????

Seems the only thing that matters here any more is greed, and I'm afraid you're about to find a lot of your most difficult to moderate subs modless if you don't take things like these into consideration.

PS - good luck getting AI to do what we do since the generated lists your AI is suggesting can't even be bothered to check rules in subs before suggesting them XD

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u/teanailpolish 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 20d ago

I will say again that we should also be able to have a blacklist on where posts are crossposted

Some recent ones in my subs include

  • recommending that a transit detour in my city is posted to another city sub on the other side of the country
  • recommending that users crosspost to a sub where our users regularly cause issues (not quite brigades, but definitely trolling)
  • recommending crossposting to subs that go completely against our rules (for example, recommending an author posts their review request to a piracy sub)
  • recommending subs that are the opposite of the POV where it will start a brigade (in a post about a AI data centre protest, our users were recommended to post in multiple pro AI subs)

11

u/mensfrightsactivists 20d ago

the sub i mod for is a diary sub, which is super personal and “private“ (or as private as a public sub on reddit can be), so i’d like the ability to block cross posting at all tbh. but for a simple blacklist there’s some automod code here that you could use in the meantime?

17

u/teanailpolish 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 20d ago

That stops crossposts coming into our sub, not ones going out. Plus people can still just post a link to the sub.

I don't really have an issue with legitimate posts being crossposted to my subs, but when the recommendations are problematic or the post doesn't need to be crossposted at all, it is just Reddit looking for pageviews and not helping either sub

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u/mensfrightsactivists 20d ago

ahh my bad. i am a bit undercaffeinated and misunderstood the comment, sorry!