It totally is. Nobody in WotC R&D participates regularly on Reddit, or has an active forum-posting profile -- hell, they didn't even when WotC actually had their own forums. They're not allowed to stream, they're required to put goofy tags in their posts and ask permission of legal to discuss even fairly prosaic things. By virtue of having to avoid card designs, they also avoid a lot of the more fruitful discussions people have about game design and ways to improve the game in a broader fashion. The concept that Maro doesn't really know what people want until they actively bring it to him (by posting to Blogatog, more than anything else) actually applies to everyone there, more or less.
Like, sure, I understand that this kind of policy can't, deep down, actually keep people from looking at websites or even reading forbidden material, but it shapes what your public, visible online participation is allowed to look like, and by doing so, reduces how much you can actually keep up with what the audience is doing.