X shuts down communities due to low usage and too much spam

Launched in 2021, when the company was still known as Twitter, the goal of Communities was to provide the social network’s users with a place to connect with each other over shared interests. Now,

Additionally, Nikitia Pierre, X’s product lead, noted that hardly anyone was using it.

“Communities had great visibility, but were used by less than 0.4% of users – yet contributed to 80% of spam reports, financial scams, and malware on X,” Pierre wrote on X, explaining the company’s thinking behind removing the prominent feature.

“Of the few communities that have been successful, most have been user acquisition channels for Kick communities or paid Clipper communities.”

In other words, communities were often not used for their original purpose. Instead, it’s become a place focused on driving (often paid) traffic to other online creators outside of X itself. (Scraping 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.)

Pierre even mocked X’s failed “Communities” project as “Temu’s version of subreddits” — a reference to groups within the most popular interest-based social network, Reddit.

However, he noted that there were a few good communities in the mix that would have to move elsewhere, but largely suggested that the feature was not worth preserving given its overall low usage.

Communities on

To prepare itself for the influx of X Community members, XChat — the app’s messaging service, which is set to launch as a standalone app — will support “joinable” links for group chats. These public links can be shared on the X timeline and pinned, supporting up to 350 members per chat. Pierre suggested that the group chat might support more members in the future.

Despite these changes, Pierre noted that X is not abandoning communities; The company will take a different approach.

In addition to expanded group chats, the company this week launched personalized timelines for its premium subscribers, which allows users to pin different topical feeds to their Home tab. These feeds are also curated and personalized to the individual user, based on how they interact with X.

Product releases and updates for

As Bier pointed out in March, the