Interesting. There have been all sorts of "Reddit's content is key to search results, adding 'reddit' to search results makes them good" stories. And there's been a lot of talk about how some of the big ML makers, notably Google, depend on Reddit's content to train their AI. And Google has that recent $60 million deal for content. So clearly Reddit's execs have been talking about how their content is valuable and they shouldn't give it away for free.

But at the same time, blocking search engines from indexing your social media site is a dangerous game. Any search engine that respects this is gonna effectively de-list Reddit. That's no good for views, and views is what makes Reddit money. Presumably they have negotiated private deals with Google and probably Microsoft for this and are trying to sell their data to ML companies, because otherwise this would seem suicidal.

Kind of a shame. The information is still going to get shared around to all the giant corporations, but Reddit will presumably make it harder to access for all the little guys. And the more they tie the content to dollars, the more managers on the inside will start doing stupid things to try and generate more of whatever the most valuable kinds of content are.