GoKawiilLaunched in 2021, when the company was still known as Twitter, Communities were meant to provide the social network’s users with a place to connect with each other around shared interests. Now, X is shutting down the feature for good, saying it was overrun with spam and a headache to manage.
Plus, noted X’s head of product Nikitia Bier, hardly anyone was using them.
“Communities had a great vision, but they were used by less than 0.4% of users—yet contributed to 80% of spam reports, financial scams, and malware on X,” Bier wrote on X, explaining the company’s thinking behind the removal of the high-profile feature.
“Of the handful of Communities that succeeded, most were user-acquisition channels for Kick or compensated clipper communities.”
We're going to be investing heavily in XChat.
Communities had a great vision, but they were used by less than 0.4% of users—yet contributed to 80% of spam reports, financial scams, and malware on X. It occupied half the team's time some weeks, while the rest of the app suffered.… — Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) April 23, 2026
In other words, Communities often weren’t being used for their original purpose. Instead, they had become a place focused on driving (often paid) traffic to other online creators outside of X itself. (Clipping is the practice of sharing short clips of another creator’s work or a brand’s video, for which the clipper is compensated. Marketers and creators leverage these communities to generate interest in their original content.)
Bier even scoffed at X’s failed Communities project as a “Temu version of subreddits” — a reference to the groups found within the more popular interest-based social network, Reddit.
Image Credits:X
... continue reading