what would Reddit need to do to get you to go back
I'm not trying to convince anyone to go back i promise, quite the contrary actually cause I think spez plans to just decrease the cost of the API and act like it was a bargain deal sacrifice while not solving any of the issues at all
But, when I think about it even if spez did actually listen and reverse all changes I don't think i want to go back to Reddit cause from what Ive seen Lemmy is just friendlier and less :Be Corporate Friendly: I would honestly love it if Lemmy did a project like r/place one of these days so we could see what the internet is actually like instead of what happened in 2022 (I really did enjoy what a bunch of communities did but when the mods started abusing their powers to make it corporate r/place lost so much meaning) but i am curious since i'm not going back is there anything Reddit can do to make you go back to Reddit?
TBH, the thing I disliked most about Reddit ended up being the community. It was nice having little niche communities, but wisps of inceldom, hivemind, and that general air of arrogance permeated the entire site. Killing the apps that made the site tolerable to use (Apollo, in my case) was just the last straw. I already used a plugin that deleted all of my posted content from the past 5 years, so I'm officially out, and it's kind of a relief. I'll stick to Discord interest servers and small communities like this one from now on.
Even if Reddit fires Steve, goes nonprofit, brings back the old algorithm, open-sources everything, unconditionally repudiates everything that led to the Aimee Challenor fiasco, rolls back every single change they scapegoated Ellen Pao for, yanks the choke chain on the powermod cabal, gets rid of New Reddit, allows apps to access their API for free forever, and permanently removes the ability to shadowban users...
...it'll still be full of arrogant, elitist pricks that intentionally misinterpret everything you say to try and get a le epic mic drop wholesome keanu chungus moment. I don't want to go back to that.
I agree with everything you said, but I'd like to add that for me personally -- I saw myself become one of those people on reddit, and I hated it. There is something about reddit that makes everything feel extremely toxic. I can't quite put my finger on it. I don't feel that way here, or on discord, or even on tumblr.
I think the general UI looking nice and modern has a weirdly high impact on people adopting it, because lord knows the actually interfacing of servers and channels is bizarre and takes a while to pick up
I literally had to have a coworker give me an invite to a server to test it out and figure out how the heck it worked. It was less obvious (or at the time felt way more gatekeepery) than Lemmy or Mastodon to me. You need an invite?
Then I found some subreddits had Discord servers, and open invites. Now... IDK. I don't think it's at all like reddit though - it's like IRC with pictures.