People would go back.

Reddit showed their hand and I’m just done with all these corpos. Reddit is my last hold out and I’m slowly leaving that too. I’m moving to the decentralized FOSS future that I believe in where we the people have the power.

I don’t intend to go back nearly as much as before, even if the changes are reverted (unlikely, imo). A lot of the aspects of Reddit that I didn’t like - but tolerated - are generally not found here, at least so far. While Lemmy still leaves things to be desired, it just feels better to engage with.

However, I may still add " reddit" to the end of a search query to avoid all the bloat articles that crop up in a search. There’s still a wealth of useful information on Reddit from all those years for even the most niche questions / topics.

I’m not going back, epescially since Apollo will be shutting down. I’m looking forward to what the dev can do with the Mlem iOS app, and I’m very interested in the community that is being built here.

Trust is the hardest thing to reclaim once lost, and this isn’t the first break. Big social is having problems, it’s the natural course of things.

Reddit is absolutely, 100% certainly not going to step back on these change. They’ve made up their mind long ago.

But just for the hypothetical: I think they lost a LOT of trust with the two most essential parts of the community - users and mods. Also the company (or rather, its CEO) may have taken significant image damage due to the “AMA” spez did.

I think business will go on as usual, but the decline will be more and more noticable over time. It will go the way of Digg. Unless of course reddit decides to hire moderation themselves. But we all know they probably wont want do do that. The course seems set to selling the data they have already accumulated.