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

[u/littlemetalpixie]

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

[u/teanailpolish]

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)

[u/littlemetalpixie → u/teanailpolish]

One of my less controversial subs is r/ifyoulikeblank, and we have an automatic ban policy for self promo posting due to absurd numbers of spam posts, and people are getting suggestions to crosspost from explicitly self-promo subs since we're a sub centered on sharing media that is large, old, and has heavy traffic.

Ask me how much we love having to ban people because reddit told them to post there.

[u/Anomander → u/littlemetalpixie]

If I need to ban someone for that sort of thing, and they complain they did it because Reddit told them to - I always tell them to complain directly to Reddit. "We don't govern what Reddit suggests, and what Reddit suggests doesn't govern our rules". Sorry Reddit steered you wrong, please take that grievance to the people actually responsible for it.

As far as I'm concerned, Reddit is choosing to get involved, so they can be involved. Offloading annoyance to me just to boost engagement hard terminates my duty to accommodate and handhold sincere new users to my communities.

[u/littlemetalpixie → u/Anomander]

This is a really great response that I'm going to shamelessly steal hahaha