There are substantial differences in the way the site works. It no longer privileges genuine celebrities; the "blue check" is for sale cheap.

And it's heavily used by people with deeply unpleasant opinions, which tend to be more heavily promoted. The network effects of communication mean that your entire experience becomes more filled with that unpleasantness.

People left because Twitter was no longer enjoyable to them. The changes shifted the equilibrium that made the community work, and they left.

Some of that was just exemplified by Musk himself, who is a deliberately abrasive person, and made changes that amplified other abrasive people. He made a big deal about the right to speak, and so he has it. But he seems to have missed that other people have the right to not listen, and people's fear of losing that right drove them off the platform even before their feeds degraded.

In my opinion, it was all organized propaganda. There were people who had very tight control over the narrative on Twitter, because it was not as open to speech as it is now. I discovered the word “zinc“ was being shadow banned during Covid. To me as an amateur researcher that was totally frustrating. But for people who were susceptible to the propaganda anything but the vaccine was a conspiracy theorist.

It was really dominated by left-wing, and by left wing I mean people aligned with the Democrats. Those are most of the people who are upset.

> What I'm still looking for is what exactly he did that drove the people away?

I have a personal policy to try to support horrible people as little as possible. Elon is a horrible person[1] and having a Twitter account means supporting him financially and through his power over the platform. Deleting my Twitter account was not a big hardship for me, so that's what I did.

[1] e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38882249 plus his support for anti-trans policies & politicians.

There's a Simpsons episode where Rev. Lovejoy's congregation leaves to follow Marge Simpson. Lovejoy says, "I'm a shepherd without a flock. What have I done to lose them?" Then he has a vision of a saint who responds, "The real question is, what have you done to keep them?"

Musk simply hasn't been a good steward of the site. Twitter had many legitimate problems when he acquired it, but it also had many healthy communities and subcultures in it as well. I used it to follow my local government who would post updates on road and bike trail closures. My research community would use it to live-tweet conference presentations and discussions. But the reckless and capricious changes Musk brought about (e.g., blue checks for sale, amplifying random "verified" accounts over non-verified accounts users have opted in to follow) showed that his priorities aren't aligned with those "boring" uses, so eventually my local government stopped using Twitter and my research community did the same. I still follow them on X, but I rarely ever see content from them on my feed.

He spoke out against the narrative, you do not need to search any further than that. He took what was a reliable narrative amplifier and turned it into a channel where not just who followed the herd could bleat - I mean tweet - out their 180 characters but also those who disagreed without immediately being reach-limited, greylisted, shadowbanned or outright banned.

Nearly all other 'big tech' companies are narrative followers and Twitter was one of them. Now they are no longer and with that they are bad.