What is considered a "repost," and why do communities often hate reposts?

A repost is the act of submitting content that has already appeared on Reddit, particularly within the same community. The term most commonly refers to images, memes, news links, and videos that have been posted and gained visibility before — sometimes recently, sometimes years earlier. The shared characteristic is that the content is not new to the community; some or many members have already encountered it. Communities develop negative reactions to reposts for several interconnected reasons. The first is simply redundancy — seeing the same meme or the same viral story for the tenth time provides no value to established members and dilutes the feed with familiar content instead of fresh discoveries. Communities that pride themselves on being discovery engines for interesting, novel content are particularly sensitive to this. The second reason relates to fairness and attribution. Repost culture, at its worst, involves systematically copying popular content that someone else created — another Redditor's original photograph, a creator's artwork, a well-crafted original story — and republishing it without credit in order to harvest upvotes. This deprives creators of the recognition and karma they earned from their original contribution. The third factor is the signal it sends about effort. Submitting a repost, particularly a very recently popular one, suggests that the poster did minimal work to contribute to the community. This perception affects how members receive not just the post but the poster. Communities vary in how strictly they enforce anti-repost norms. Some, like r/memes, have AutoModerator checks that scan for recently posted images and automatically remove duplicates. Others simply rely on community members to call out reposts in the comments. Reading a community's rules about reposts — and searching for your content before posting it — is the most direct way to avoid the problem. The definition of "too recent" for a repost varies considerably by community. Some subreddits consider any content posted in the last six months a repost; others apply longer windows. A few communities permit reposts of truly classic content on annual cycles — a beloved holiday post, for instance — while strictly banning more recent duplicates. Understanding a community's specific stance on reposts, which is usually in its rules, is the most reliable way to know where the line falls.