This is Xiaohongshu, the Chinese app to which TikTok users are fleeing

At least so far, meanness and revenge seem to be enough to motivate people to learn to navigate Xiaohongshu.a app used mostly by Chinese-speaking people and was not designed with Western users in mind. “I have no idea what I’m doing here. I can’t even read the rules,” said a TikTok refugee known as “Elle belle” in a post of the platform.

“Hello everyone, my name is Ryan. I’m a TikTok refugee. The US government is banning appso we are looking for an alternative… we don’t want to interrupt them. I hope we don’t have to stay here long,” wrote Ryan Martin, another user in a video aimed at the Chinese user base. He translated the phrase into Chinese and used a robotic voice generator to read it; the clip received more than 24,000″ I like it.” “They don’t interrupt. When you are active, we are sleeping,” states one of the most read comments in Chinese.

There are also dozens of live audio chats on the platform in which American and Chinese users explain to each other, probably for the first time in many cases, how their respective societies work and clear up common misunderstandings. One of the most popular was listened to by almost 30,000 users.

Why is Xiaohongshu so popular?

Although Xiaohongshu is not specifically named in the Protecting Americans from Adversarial Controlled Foreign Apps Act, the rule stipulates that “any adversary-controlled foreign application” may suffer a similar fate in the future. That is to say, there are no guarantees that Red Note will not follow in TikTok’s footsteps and be blocked by the US government.

The TikTok ban may have catapulted Xiaohongshu into the spotlight in the United States, but the app It has been successful in China for a long time. Founded in 2013, the Shanghai-based company has operated one of the most trending platforms in the Asian country. It reportedly generated more than $1 billion in annual profits by 2024. Simply put, the platform is so trendy that the only people who haven’t heard of it are the Western countries deified by TikTok.

It also has a strong following among Chinese speakers outside the country, from overseas Chinese students to Taiwanese to diaspora communities in Malaysia. Restaurants, tourist attractions and travel companies around the world have begun to pay attention to the application due to the large number of Chinese tourists who rely on it for local information and recommendations from their fellow Chinese.

The app is very different from TikTok in some important ways. Although Xiaohongshu allows users to post clips vertical, Most of the content on the platform is slideshows of photos accompanied by text, so people tend to see it more as a Instagram competitor than from TikTok. He feed The app’s grid-like design, powered by artificial intelligence and known as a “masonry grid” in professional tech circles, has been so successful in attracting users that large social media companies like Tencent and ByteDance copied the design. in their own products. Lemon8, the other popular social media app developed by ByteDance apart from TikTok, is seen as an attempt to emulate Xiaohongshu’s success.