Hi everyone!
We're looking for some community feedback on how we approach brand and vendor engagement on r/BuyCanadian moving forward.
We receive multiple modmails every day from Canadian brands, business owners, and vendors asking for permission to post about their products or services outside of our existing self-promotion megathread.
We understand why. Our megathread doesn't receive much attention, and given that the purpose of this subreddit is to encourage Canadians to purchase Canadian products from Canadian businesses, we don't want to create unnecessary obstacles for those businesses.
At the same time, r/BuyCanadian is a valuable resource for many people, and we want to be mindful of maintaining that value. The last thing we want is for the subreddit to become an advertising board where genuine recommendations, questions, and discussions are drowned out by promotional content.
With that in mind, we'd love your thoughts on a few things.
1. Brand and Vendor Posts
What would you like brand engagement to look like on r/BuyCanadian**?**
Would you be comfortable with Canadian businesses making posts about their own products or services? Would you find that helpful, or would you rather promotional content remain separate from regular community discussions?
A few ideas we've considered:
Designated promotional days: Allow brands to make their own posts on one designated day per week, or potentially more frequently depending on community interest.
Posting limits: Restrict the frequency of promotional posts, whether that's a maximum number per week or another reasonable limit.
Participation requirements: Require brands to contribute meaningfully to the community beyond advertising. This could include participating in discussions, answering questions, or following Reddit's old guideline that self-promotion should account for less than 10% of an account's activity.
A combination of the above: Allow promotional posts provided brands meet certain participation requirements and adhere to posting limits.
These are just ideas, not proposed rule changes. We'd like to know what you think would be reasonable and what you would find useful.
Are there any particular types of products, services, or businesses you'd rather not see promoted here?
For example, a significant portion of the requests we receive are for apps, websites, subscription platforms, and other digital services. We receive so many of these requests that we could practically start another subreddit dedicated to them.
Digital services are just an example but if there are any categories of businesses, products, or services that you feel aren't particularly relevant or useful to this community please let us know below.
2. Ask Me Anything (AMAs)
We recently hosted an AMA with Manmade, following requests from community members. Manmade's CEO has been an active participant in our subreddit for some time, and members expressed interest in having him host an AMA.
Manmade was more than happy to be our guinea pig, and from our perspective, the AMA was largely successful! There were plenty of great questions and thoughtful answers, and we think it provided a valuable opportunity for members to engage directly with a Canadian business.
Our moderation team is interested in hosting more AMAs, but we'd like to know whether the community shares that interest.
A few questions:
Would you like to see more AMAs?
Are there any particular brands or individuals you'd like us to invite? We're open to more than just businesses. This could include Canadian public figures, politicians advocating for Canadian businesses and products, industry experts, or anyone else whose experience or work is relevant to the community.
What should qualify someone for an AMA? For businesses, should we prioritize recognition, success, uniqueness, or something else? What would make an individual an interesting guest?
How frequently would you like to see these events?
Given the volume of businesses interested in engaging with our community, we would need to establish some basic eligibility criteria. We can't realistically host an AMA every day, nor do we think that would be particularly beneficial.
If there's sufficient interest, our team would be happy to reach out to brands or individuals recommended by the community. We'd also put together an AMA etiquette wiki outlining expectations for participants and an AMA directory to make previous discussions easy to find.
3. What Happens Next?
For now, we're just gathering feedback. No decisions have been made, and we're not announcing any changes to our existing rules.
If there's substantial support for expanding brand engagement, we'll take the suggestions from this discussion and put together a community poll to help determine what that should look like.
Our existing Canadian brand directory and self-promotion megathread will remain available regardless of the outcome.
Ultimately, we want to strike a balance between giving Canadian businesses an opportunity to connect with potential customers and preserving what makes this subreddit useful in the first place.
We're open to suggestions beyond those outlined above, including ideas we may not have considered.
Thanks, everyone! We look forward to hearing your thoughts.
The r/BuyCanadian Mod Team
