So, I had an incredibly fucked-up childhood in a toxic abusive environment and never really learned how to people.
When I was younger I was... abrasive, let's say. Or possibly just an insufferable prick. I would argue with people on the internet a lot and generate a lot of conflict - not from a desire to troll (as many assumed), I was just raised in a test-to-destruction environment where loud table-slapping debate was just how you learned things - kind of cage-match debugging sessions kind of thing.
This didn't make me many friends, understandably.
Anyway, decades passed and I learned to mellow out a bit, to go along to get along, and to develop some soft skills like y'know, tact, and... compassion for people's emotional investment in their intellectual position, if that has a name.
Well and good, the people I talk to don't generally want to strangle me, chalk it up as a win.
But increasingly of late I've been hearing disparaging talk of 'people pleasers', which as best I can tell seems to refer to people who do all the things I was yelled for not doing half my life: going along to get along, valuing other people's needs and emotional sore spots, taking a cooperative, defensive-driving kind of approach to social ineraction - and I am confuse.
I lack a proper framework to parse this all intuitively; I had to build my social skillset manually by trial and error, and things obvious to others remain somewhat mysterious to me.
I'm not actually ASD (just ADHD), but my lack-of-intuitive-grasp on certain things presents a similar profile. Can someone give me a longhand explanation of the border between not-an-asshole and people-pleasing?
I'm not sure I'll answer this exactly right but here's my thought on your question.
People pleasing to the point that you almost always sacrifice your own wants and needs is the the kind of thing that is seen or talked about as problematic.
The goal is to find as fair a balance as possible between not being an asshole but also not always sacrificing your own wants and needs. It can be hard for some people who have a personality where they always take a back seat to what others want or need in social situations. They are true people pleasers in the negative sense of the word.
I think some people use the term people pleaser to simply refer to someone who is nice, but that's inaccurate because just being nice and handling social situations well is great as long as you aren't always sacrificing your own wants and needs.
I've been called a people pleaser many times. I've worked hard to find a better balance between my own needs and others. Now I know that I am instead just a very nice person, but am more than willing to put my own wants and needs first. It just took me a while to figure out that my wants and needs are just as important as others.
Like I said, balance can be hard, but I think most people will be just fine if they stick to the "don't be an asshole" part.