TikTok received an obvious reprieve from being pressured to close down, however People on Monday have been nonetheless utilizing and downloading Xiaohongshu, the Chinese language social media app that surged in reputation final week in anticipation of TikTok’s closure.
TikTok, owned by the Chinese language web firm ByteDance, went darkish in america forward of a federal regulation requiring it to be bought or banned on Sunday. TikTok quickly got here again on-line after President-elect Donald J. Trump mentioned he would concern an govt order to place off a ban as soon as he took workplace on Monday.
Many questions stay about TikTok’s fate in america. For now, Xiaohongshu, which many individuals are calling RedNote, is leaning into its sudden celeb in america.
Over the weekend, Xiaohongshu added a characteristic to let customers translate posts and feedback between Mandarin and English. On Monday it was on the prime of Apple’s rating of most downloaded apps, a spot it has held for a lot of the previous week.
Based on information on RedNote, 32.6 million notes have been posted with the hashtag “tiktok refugee” as of Monday, gaining 2.3 billion views.
People on the platform mentioned they deliberate to maintain posting on RedNote, despite the fact that TikTok had come again on-line.
“TikTok is again. Will I nonetheless proceed utilizing this app? Completely,” a consumer in america posted. “I’m going nowhere.”
The preliminary customers of Xiaohongshu exterior of China needed to overcome vital language boundaries. In interviews and on the app, early joiners mentioned they used instruments like ChatGPT and Google Translate to determine find out how to register accounts and work together with different customers, most of whom have been in China.
“I feel it’s actually cool that we’re seeing a very totally different nation and seeing their cultural variations from ours and it’s all merging,” mentioned Sky Bynum, 18, who creates magnificence movies from her residence in New Jersey. “That’s one thing that you would be able to’t do on TikTok or Instagram or Fb or YouTube.”
Chinese language customers have been additionally serving to their new social media mates navigate China’s strict censorship. Don’t submit any pictures involving nudity or weapons, they suggested.
People have posted movies taking Chinese language viewers alongside for a buying journey to Walmart and speaking about how a lot it prices to take their 4 youngsters to dinner. The conversations have introduced up subjects which can be typically thought of delicate on-line in China, together with whether or not folks may be open about their sexuality and the lengthy hours that many work. On a video about how folks in China’s tech business work lengthy hours, commenters in america shared their job schedules engaged on oil rigs, in hospitals and at Taco Bell.
Though Xiaohongshu is extraordinarily widespread in China, particularly amongst younger girls in large cities, the corporate has stored a low profile. It has not up to date its English-language firm information web page in nearly two years.
Xiaohongshu has posted almost a dozen job openings every single day for the previous week on its recruitment web site. Among the many positions listed have been one for an engineer to work on the platform’s “content material safety emergency response functionality development.” It’s also in search of somebody to be answerable for content material safety threat evaluation and evaluation, and interns with “glorious written and spoken English expertise.”
Xiaohongshu, a privately held firm, is operated by Xingyin Info Expertise, which is predicated in Shanghai and owned by the billionaire entrepreneurs Charlwin Mao and Miranda Qu. As of final July, Xiaohongshu had raised almost $1 billion because it was based over a decade in the past, in line with Crunchbase, from traders together with Alibaba, HongShan and Tencent, the Chinese language web big behind the nation’s most ubiquitous app, WeChat.
The app lets customers share quick movies in addition to nonetheless, text-based posts, which generally appeal to lengthy, Reddit-like remark threads. Like TikTok, Xiaohongshu is powered by a proprietary algorithm, which recommends content material focused to maintain folks scrolling.
