jack

Sure. Communities are a feature on Livejournal and Dreamwidth that works like subreddits. The idea has been suggested before, so I'm surprised I haven't seen it come up in this conversation yet.

Communities are groups that people can join, which means they have member counts, so if people are interested in making that information public, you could easily display those counts on a community index page. This is a clearer piece of information than a popularity indicator on tags.

Communities would eliminate the need for different groups to fight over the same tag. For instance, if the #bats tag were a cluttered mess of both animal bats and baseball bats, it wouldn't matter, because people could just follow a community instead of the tag and therefore only see whichever bats they prefer.

Any community member can post to a community, but the community also has user moderators (not site staff) who can remove spam or off-topic posts. So if someone posts a baseball bat to the community about animal bats, the mod can just remove it.

Communities also mean you don't have to worry about there being a bunch of different variations on the same tag, like #Dragon Age II, #DAII, and #DA2. If you want to share something with Dragon Age II fans, you can just check the community index for the relevant community and share your post with that one. People might make more than one community for the topic, but there would still be a finite list of communities to check, as opposed to the infinite possible variations on a tag that you'd have to preemptively think up on your own.