“I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said. “But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature.”
If they’re already giving exclusive access to Google for search and AI training, my bet is it’s all in a bid for ‘please buy us daddy Google’, and let them handle it from there.