X shuts down Communities, feature used by under 0.4% of users drives 80% of spam and malware reports

X will shut down its Communities feature on May 6 after concluding that the groups were both lightly used and disproportionately abusive.

According to TechCrunch, X head of product Nikita Bier said Communities were used by less than 0.4% of users but generated 80% of spam reports, including financial scams and malware. Bier added that moderating the feature consumed “half the team’s time some weeks,” while the rest of the app “suffered.” Communities launched in 2021 under Twitter as interest-based spaces akin to subreddits, but Bier described the result as a “Temu version of subreddits.”

The numbers point to a familiar platform problem: tools designed to create smaller, higher-trust spaces often become attractive precisely because they are smaller. A niche group with its own moderators can look like a cheap way to concentrate attention; it can also look like a cheap way to concentrate victims. If only a fraction of users ever join, but a large share of abuse reports originate there, the feature becomes a high-cost liability rather than a growth engine.

Bier’s explanation also reveals how product roadmaps get triaged inside large social platforms. A feature that produces a flood of scams forces the company to spend scarce engineering and moderation capacity on containment. That work is hard to showcase in a launch cycle, and it competes directly with revenue-adjacent projects like messaging and payments.

X says it will steer displaced Communities toward group chats in its revamped messaging product, XChat, which is expected to launch as a standalone app. TechCrunch reports that XChat will support “joinable” public links for group chats, allow up to 350 members per chat, and may increase that limit later. Community admins are being told to migrate their members into these chats before the shutdown.

X is also pushing other forms of topic-based consumption. This week it launched Custom Timelines for Premium subscribers, letting users pin topical feeds to the Home tab. The company has been shipping new features at a faster pace, Bier said, with “two to three net new features per week.”

Communities were supposed to make X more like a set of interest clubs. They will be replaced by group chats with invite links.

On May 6, the feature that attracted less than one half of one percent of users will disappear from the app entirely.