Reddit crosspost

A Reddit crosspost shares an existing post into a second subreddit while preserving a visible link back to the original thread and its author. The crossposted version is labeled as coming from the source community, so readers can click through to the original discussion. That attribution is what separates a crosspost from a repost, which is a fresh copy of the same content submitted as if it were new, with no connection to where it first appeared.

Crossposting is a built-in feature, reachable from a post’s share options. Where that option sits differs between the desktop site, the official apps, and third-party clients, and it is not always available: a subreddit can prevent its own posts from being crossposted out, and a target subreddit can refuse to accept crossposts in. Any specific description of the interface, including this one, is worth treating as approximate.

Crosspost and repost

Both put the same content in front of a second audience. The difference is what each one tells the reader about where that content came from.

A crosspost declares its origin. The submission carries the name of the source subreddit and the original author, and a reader who wants the original discussion is one click away from it. A repost declares nothing. The content appears as an ordinary submission, and unless a reader happens to recognize it, nothing on the page indicates it existed anywhere else first.

Reposting is not prohibited across Reddit. Plenty of communities tolerate it, and material that resurfaces years later often finds an audience that never saw it. What communities object to is a repost that takes credit: someone else’s photo, screenshot, or write-up presented as firsthand. That is why repost-detection bots exist. The objection is to concealment, not duplication.

Read that way, the distinction stops being Reddit trivia. A crosspost is a citation. A repost is a copy. Only one of them survives being noticed.

What the attribution carries

A crosspost is a new submission, not a mirror. It collects its own score and its own comments, and the original thread keeps its own. The discussion splits in two, which is worth knowing before crossposting something you are still answering questions in.

The target subreddit’s rules govern the crosspost completely, and being well received in the source community counts for nothing there. A crosspost passes through the target’s automated rules, its account age and karma gates, and its moderators’ judgment, exactly as a fresh submission would.

The attribution also runs backwards. A crosspost gives the target community a path into the original thread, and moderators who restrict crossposts often cite that path directly: readers with no history in the source community arriving to vote or argue are disruptive whether or not anyone intended it. Reddit’s sitewide rules about interfering with other communities apply regardless of any subreddit’s crosspost policy.

What a crosspost does not settle is the question of credit. How vote activity on a crosspost registers for the original author is not something Reddit documents plainly, and the details have changed over time. Nothing here should be built on an assumption about it. If the point is to credit someone, the visible link and the named author already do that work.

How communities treat it

There is no single sitewide rule, only what each subreddit decides for itself. Some communities welcome crossposts as a way to surface relevant material from elsewhere on Reddit. Many restrict them, and a fair number prohibit them entirely, either because they want original submissions or because crossposted threads tend to bring along an audience with different norms. Moderators can also block their community’s posts from being crossposted out. The dependable habit is the one that applies everywhere on the site: read the target subreddit’s rules before sharing anything into it.

The pattern underneath those rules is fairly consistent. A crosspost is welcome when it is a service to the target community: a thread its members would want to see, from a place they do not follow, shared by someone who reads both. It is unwelcome when it is a service to the poster: the same submission moved from room to room because the first room did not produce the response wanted.

Members can usually tell which is which, because the visible origin makes a crosspost easy to audit: anyone can click through to the source and see the rest of what that account has been crossposting. A profile full of one submission pushed into nine subreddits in an afternoon is not subtle, and a regular usually finds it before a moderator does. That is the trade a crosspost makes: it buys credibility by declaring its origin, and pays for it by being fully inspectable.

For operators

Crossposting is also where a familiar failure mode lives. Pushing the same promotional post into a long list of subreddits in quick succession is the canonical spam pattern, and it is among the easiest behaviors on the site to notice. Members recognize it, and moderators write rules against it. What Reddit’s own filters do with it is not published, but accounts that produce this pattern are widely reported to lose visibility, sometimes silently, as described under Reddit shadowban.

The attribution does not change that arithmetic. A crosspost carries an honest link back to the original and still puts the same promotional content in front of nine communities that did not ask for it. Declaring where a blast came from does not stop it being a blast. If anything the attribution makes the pattern easier to reconstruct, since every copy points back to the same thread and the same account.

The alternative is one community, one context. A post written for the specific audience of a single subreddit, in its own vocabulary and on its own terms, looks nothing like blast distribution because it is nothing like it. The difference tends to show up first in the upvote ratio: content that reads as recycled collects quiet downvotes from regulars long before anyone comments. That principle is part of the broader etiquette collected under reddiquette, and the working method behind it is covered in Reddit marketing for founders.

Crossposting your own material is defensible in one narrow case: a genuinely useful thread that is not about you, asked for by someone in another community or plainly on topic there under rules that permit it. That is a judgment made once, for one post, for one community, not a distribution channel. Hermenea agents are built around the same constraint, participating in one community at a time rather than replicating a message across many.