To crosspost on Reddit, open the post, hit the share icon beneath it, choose the crosspost option, pick a destination subreddit, adapt the title, and submit. The destination gets a brand new submission with its own votes and comments. Reddit now officially calls the feature reposting, which is why so many guides describe menus that no longer match your screen. This guide covers the current steps, the karma rules, why some communities are greyed out, and the question almost nobody asks: whether a crosspost is even the right format for that destination.
A crosspost on Reddit is a native sharing feature that republishes an existing post into a second subreddit as a new submission with its own votes and comment thread, displaying a labeled preview that links back to the original post and credits the original poster.
Key takeaways
- Reddit's help center renamed crossposting to "reposting," and the share-menu label varies by platform version, but the mechanics have not changed.
- A crosspost is a new submission: it starts at zero in the destination and competes in that community's feed on its own votes and comments.
- Upvotes on a crosspost credit whoever submitted the crosspost, so crossposting your own post keeps the karma with you.
- Communities that are greyed out in the picker have disabled crossposts; the compliant alternative is a fresh native post, if the sub's rules allow the content.
- The visible crosspost label is social proof in some communities and a spam signal in others, so decide crosspost vs fresh post per destination, not globally.
- Verify every crosspost logged out. Each destination runs its own AutoMod gates, and crossposts often die silently.
What Is a Crosspost on Reddit and Why Did Reddit Rename It?
A crosspost is Reddit's built-in way to share an existing post into another subreddit. The destination community receives a new submission showing a preview of the original along with the original poster's username, home community, and current score. Reddit's help center now calls the feature "reposting, formerly known as crossposting," though redditors and most subreddit rule pages still say crosspost.
The rename matters for one practical reason. Depending on whether you are on new Reddit, old Reddit, or a given version of the mobile app, the option may be labeled Crosspost, Crosspost to a community, or simply appear as a community choice under Share. If a guide tells you to look for a button that does not exist on your screen, you are not doing anything wrong. Open the share menu under the post and the option will be there under whichever label your interface uses, as long as the destination allows it.
Mechanically, a crosspost creates two independent conversations. The original keeps its votes and comment thread. The crosspost accumulates a separate score and a separate discussion in the destination, and it rises or sinks in that community's feed purely on its own performance. Readers can click through the preview to the original at any time, which is how a strong crosspost also feeds votes and comments back to the source post.
The reach argument for learning this properly is simple scale. Reddit reported 126.8 million daily active uniques in Q1 2026, up 17 percent year over year, alongside 493.1 million weekly active uniques (Reddit Q1 2026 earnings release). No single subreddit puts your content in front of more than a sliver of that. Crossposting is the platform-sanctioned way for one piece of content to earn placement in several communities at once.
How Do You Crosspost on Reddit in 2026?
Open the post, click or tap the share icon beneath it, choose the crosspost or community option, select the destination subreddit, adjust the pre-filled title, add any required flair, and submit. The mechanical part takes under a minute once you know where the post is going.
On desktop:
- Open the post you want to share.
- Click the share icon under the post.
- Choose the crosspost option (the label varies, as covered above).
- Search for the destination community in the dialog.
- Edit the pre-filled title so it fits the destination's vocabulary. Reusing the original title everywhere is the laziest shortcut in crossposting and the most expensive one; title adaptation is covered in the sequencing section below.
- Set flair if the destination requires it, then submit.
In the mobile app the flow is the share icon, then the crosspost or community option, then the destination. One quirk worth knowing: the app's community picker leans heavily on subreddits you have joined or visited recently. If a destination refuses to appear on mobile, join it first or run the crosspost from a desktop browser.
Two things sit outside your control in that dialog. First, you can only crosspost into communities that accept crossposts; everything else is filtered out or greyed out. Second, the preview always displays the original post's current score and source community, so the destination audience sees exactly where the content came from and how it performed. Those two constraints shape crosspost strategy far more than the button mechanics do, which is why the rest of this guide is about them.
If baseline posting mechanics like post types, flair, and community selection are still shaky, run through our how to post on Reddit guide first. Crossposting inherits every one of those fundamentals.
Do Crossposts Give You Karma?
Yes. Upvotes on a crosspost credit the account that submitted the crosspost, not the original poster. Crosspost your own post and both submissions feed your karma. When someone else crossposts your content, they collect the crosspost's karma while you keep the original's votes, plus whatever click-through voting the crosspost sends back to the source.
That attribution rule creates a quiet strategic choice. Self-crossposting is controllable: you pick the destinations, the titles, and the timing, and every upvote lands on your account. Organic crossposts by other users are more credible, since a stranger redistributing your content carries zero self-promotion smell, but you cannot schedule strangers. Most operators run both: distribute deliberately with their own account and treat organic crossposts as a bonus signal that the content genuinely travels.
Karma gates still apply at every destination. A subreddit that requires minimum karma or account age applies those thresholds to crossposts exactly as it does to regular submissions, so a multi-community distribution plan is only as strong as the account executing it. If you are unclear on how the karma ledgers work in the first place, our Reddit karma explainer breaks down post karma, comment karma, and the per-subreddit karma that these gates actually check.
Why Is Crossposting Greyed Out for Some Subreddits?
A greyed-out or missing community in the crosspost picker means that subreddit's moderators have disabled crossposts. Reddit filters ineligible destinations out of the flow entirely, so there is no setting on your side that fixes it. The compliant alternative is a fresh native post, and only if the community's rules allow that content.
This is policy, not a judgment of your content. Communities built around original content, tightly moderated professional subs, and format-specific communities commonly switch crossposts off to keep their feeds native. Here is the full troubleshooting picture:
| What you see | What it usually means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Community greyed out in the picker | Mods disabled crossposting for that subreddit | Post natively if the rules allow the content, or drop the destination |
| Community missing in the app but available on desktop | The mobile picker favors joined and recently visited communities | Join the subreddit first, or crosspost from desktop |
| Crosspost option absent on the post itself | The original was deleted or removed, or its post type is ineligible | Confirm the original is still live before planning any distribution |
| Crosspost submits, then quietly vanishes | A destination AutoMod gate: karma, account age, or a rule against crossposts | Run the logged-out check below, then re-read the destination's rules |
Before adding any community to a distribution list, pull its posting requirements with our free subreddit stats checker: karma minimums, account age expectations, and the rules that decide whether your content type is welcome at all. Thirty seconds of checking beats a removal that flags your account for closer scrutiny.
When Should You Crosspost on Reddit and When Should You Post Fresh?
Crosspost when the label helps you and post fresh when it hurts you. The "crossposted from" tag plus the visible original score works as social proof in broad, aggregator-style communities. In promo-wary niche communities it reads as recycled content, and a retitled native post written for that audience will usually outperform it.
This per-destination fork is the step nearly every guide skips. The standard advice is to crosspost everywhere the rules allow, which quietly assumes every audience reacts to the label the same way. They do not. We run engagement across a large network of accounts and communities, and the pattern is consistent: the same content packaged as a crosspost and as a fresh native post lands completely differently depending on the destination's culture.
| Destination situation | Better format | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Broad, high-traffic community, and the original is showing a strong score | Crosspost | The label plus a healthy visible score acts as pre-validation |
| Niche community sensitive to marketing, and the content involves your product or brand | Fresh native post with a community-specific title | The label plus an outside sub name flags redistribution; a native post reads as participation |
| Crossposts disabled by the destination | Fresh native post, only if the rules allow the content | The only compliant route in |
| The original is sitting at a single-digit score | Neither, yet | The preview broadcasts that weak score to the new audience; fix the original first |
| Heavy audience overlap with the original community | Skip the destination | People who already saw it rarely upvote it twice, and repeat exposure invites downvotes |
Two honest warnings that most articles in this space leave out. First, fresh-posting near-identical content into several communities in a short window is exactly the repetition pattern Reddit's spam systems and moderators watch for, so the fresh-post lane demands genuine adaptation of title, framing, and first comment, never copy-paste. Our self-promotion rules breakdown covers where those lines sit. Second, deleting and re-submitting crossposts to chase a better result teaches moderators to treat your username as a problem. Decide the format before submitting, not after.
How Do You Sequence Crossposts Across Multiple Subreddits?
Prove the original first, qualify every destination, then distribute one community at a time with adapted titles and real spacing between submissions. A crosspost inherits the credibility of the number in its preview, so distribution starts when the original has a score a stranger would respect, not the moment it goes live.
Qualification is three checks per destination: the rules permit crossposts and your content type, the audience is meaningfully different from the original community, and your account clears the sub's posting gates. Any destination that fails one check gets cut.
The proof threshold scales with community size, but the logic is fixed: the preview broadcasts the original's score. A crosspost pointing at a post with a respectable number invites clicks. One pointing at a stalled post invites the assumption that the content already failed somewhere else. If the original is stuck below the score you would want strangers to see, that is the point where many marketers stop doing this manually: our buy Reddit upvotes service seeds the original with early votes from aged, established accounts, so distribution starts from a preview worth clicking. Prefer the organic route? Our guide to getting upvotes on Reddit covers the first-hour playbook in full.
Title adaptation is non-negotiable. Every community has its own vocabulary, and the fastest way to hear it is to study what already wins there. Pull the top-performing titles of any destination with our free subreddit title scraper and write your variant in that register, keeping the substance identical.
Spacing and volume caps are guardrails we run internally rather than published platform rules, and they exist because bursts of similar submissions from one account are the classic manipulation signature:
| Account situation | Destinations per content piece | Spacing between submissions |
|---|---|---|
| Young account with thin karma | 1 to 2 | Different days where possible |
| Established account, no history in the destinations | 3 to 4 | At least 30 to 60 minutes apart |
| Aged account with real participation in each destination | 5 to 6 | Spread across the day, each at that community's peak |
Align each submission with the destination's own active window using the free best time to post tool; a perfect crosspost dropped in a community's dead hours wastes the one advantage sequencing gives you. Then treat every crosspost as a live post. It arrives with an empty comment thread no matter how lively the original's discussion is, so seed a first comment written for that specific audience within minutes and answer early replies. That early activity is what pushes a submission up a community's feed, and the underlying mechanics are the same ones covered in our Reddit front page breakdown.
The whole distribution run condenses to a repeatable sequence — the same order we run on every post worth crossposting:
How Do You Know If a Crosspost Was Removed?
Open the crosspost's URL in a logged-out or private browser window a few minutes after submitting. A removed crosspost usually still looks live from your own account, which is why silent failures go unnoticed. If the logged-out view shows the post missing or removed, the destination filtered it.
Crossposts fail silently more often than regular posts because every destination runs its own gate stack. AutoMod rules, karma and age minimums, and community spam settings are evaluated fresh by each subreddit, and plenty of subs carry AutoMod rules that remove crossposts outright or hold them for review. Clearing the original community's filters proves nothing about the next one. Our post removal guide maps every removal mechanism on the platform, and the AutoModerator breakdown shows how to read a destination's filters before you trip them.
The logged-out check matters beyond diagnostics. Reddit's Q4 2025 shareholder letter reported logged-out users growing 27 percent year over year, faster than logged-in growth, so the logged-out view is what a large share of your potential readers actually see. Make the private-window check a fixed ritual after every submission in a distribution run, and audit older runs with our free removed content viewer to find which crossposts quietly died. A pattern of removals in one community means stop submitting there and re-read its rules, not resubmit harder. And if crossposts are vanishing across several unrelated communities at once, the problem is likely the account rather than the destinations; our Reddit account health guide covers that diagnosis.
How Many Crossposts Count as Spam?
There is no published numeric limit. Reddit's help guidance warns that reposting content into unrelated communities can be seen as spammy behavior, so the line is drawn by relevance and repetition, not by a counter. One crosspost per community per piece of content, into communities where the content genuinely belongs, stays comfortably inside it.
The patterns that cross the line are consistent: submitting the same content to the same community twice, blasting every tangentially related subreddit within minutes, and distributing before the original has proven anything. Each one looks like broadcasting rather than participating, and moderators act on the account, not just the post. When a run starts collecting downvotes and removals instead of engagement, that is the community answering the relevance question for you. Shrink the destination list instead of pushing through it. A smaller set of communities where the content fits will beat a long list where it does not, on this run and every future one, because account standing carries forward.
FAQ
Do you get karma from crossposting your own post?
Yes. Upvotes on the crosspost credit the account that submitted it, so crossposting your own content keeps that karma with you. The original post continues collecting its own votes separately, and readers clicking through from the crosspost can add votes there as well. Two submissions, two independent karma streams, both yours.
Why can't I crosspost to a certain subreddit?
The most common reason is that the community's moderators disabled crossposting, which greys it out or hides it in the picker. Other causes include the original post being deleted or removed, a post type the destination does not accept, or the mobile picker only surfacing communities you have already joined.
What is the difference between a crosspost and a repost on Reddit?
Officially, nothing anymore: Reddit's help center renamed crossposting to reposting, and both describe the labeled share format with a preview linking back to the original. In everyday usage, though, redditors still say repost to mean re-uploading someone's content as your own, which strips attribution and is against many community rules.
Can you crosspost to multiple subreddits at once?
No. Reddit has no bulk crosspost button, and that is a feature rather than a gap. Each destination needs its own title, flair, and timing, so submit crossposts one at a time with real spacing between them. Bursts of identical submissions from one account are a classic spam signature.
Does a crosspost hurt the original post?
No. The original keeps its votes, comments, and feed position regardless of how crossposts perform. A well-placed crosspost usually helps the original by sending click-through readers who vote and comment at the source. The real risk sits with the account: sloppy crossposting into the wrong communities damages your standing, not the post.
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