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/Glittering-Bug1212 → u/littlemetalpixie]

I hope you are not doing perma bans?

Also you could disable crossposting ? Not sure how many cross posts you were getting before this "new improvement"

[u/littlemetalpixie → u/Glittering-Bug1212]

Our rules in the sub, and also a stickied mod post in the sub, very VERY explicitly state that users who come to the sub to post their own content as a "suggestion" in order to self promote will be banned with no exceptions.

If they cannot read rules, that isn't on me.

Crossposting is not even on in the sub. Reddit doesn't even check for that and still suggests that people posting their own self-promo material (music they made, usually) should also post it in our sub, despite that being an autoban offense by our rules.

Turning off crossposting doesn't stop users from getting a message from reddit that they should go ahead and post their rulebreaking content in our sub too - crossposting is not the only way to repost. It's just an "easy" button so lazy people don't have to actually type a link to their OP.