X is still one of the largest social platforms in the world, with usage estimated in the range of 570–600 million monthly users and reported growth in daily users; it remains the go-to platform for real-time news and breaking events. Under Musk it pioneered Community Notes, a crowdsourced fact-checking system later copied by Meta and TikTok. The honest caveats: ad revenue fell sharply after 2022, some features were wound down, and engagement-quality and moderation debates are real (the EU is investigating X under its content rules). So "changed, controversial, and smaller on ads" is fair — but a platform used by hundreds of millions daily and copied by its rivals is not a "dying ghost town."