I truly hope no one is thinking of dropping tags, although I see they aren't showed in steemit.com interface anymore, but I expect that to be just because @roadscape wants people to focus on communities.

I can see a very good evolution where we can combine communities and tags together.

What we see now about communities is just the beginning. There's more coming. Actually I was hoping for more right now at launch, but I guess roadscape felt more would be confusing, and judging by the reactions, I tend to agree with this position.

But in the future there will be more types of communities. For example, a community where only members can post, not anyone, like now, or a regular tag.

Communities also have a sense of ownership and moderation (not necessarily downvote!), tags don't. That's the main difference with communities so far.