Grown in popularity is not really a metric. A normal tuesday and the day half the company's staffers got fired aren't going to be the same in popularity. Doesn't mean one is better. Twitter is definitely more popular for all the mess they've made, yes.

The "narrative" was right. There are actual outages now unlike earlier. It's not like twitter engineers were holding up the servers to the light for there to be outages the moment they're gone. Systems run on their own just fine, until something does go wrong. And if there's nobody there to fix it, something usually small blows up. Enough of these and users start to notice degraded performance and outages.

It's actually faster now than it's ever been, especially if you're using it from outside of North America.

Search breaks for me all the time, and I need to manually refresh the site at least once a day. Also, I can only scroll on Musk’s twitter profile to his tweets from September.

I think it’s due to more aggressive VPN blocking, but I’m not sure about it.

All the Apple ecosystem developers left, all the neo-Nazis were unbanned to add subscriber numbers, I see 1-2 ads a day because all the respectable advertisers left due to the Nazis[0], and the For You page now regularly does things like show you tweets from locked accounts, circles you're not in, and people who've blocked you.

Elon seems to have given up; he's just doing jokes now like changing his name to Harry Ballz and replying to fake news from the fake news accounts he unbanned.

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-twitter-perpetuati...

Wow, if the McDonald's marketing chief says Elon Musk is a nazi, it must be pretty serious...