How RedNote is perceived by Chinese people
So I am from China but currently live in the U.S. I am a casual user of RedNote: never posted anything, but spend maybe 1-2 hours every week scrolling on average. When I discovered this sub I was quite surprised that the perception of RedNote here is overwhelmingly positive — in fact much more positive than how this app is perceived in China, which is esp. surprising since Reddit is sort of an “anti-China” platform in general.
It seems that there has been little discussion here on how Chinese people view RedNote, and I figured that this might be interesting to some. I will try to be neutral but obviously everyone has their own bias. Below is how (from my understanding) RedNote is perceived in China in general, not necessarily my own opinion (although I do share some of those general views).
Tl;dr — The perception of RedNote in China is similar to the perception of Instagram in the U.S.: some view it as a friendly and positive platform, while others believe it is toxic and the positivity is mostly fake.
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RedNote is primarily known as an app where middle-class people in tier 1 or tier 2 cities share their semi-upscale lives, and consumerism is rampant there. People say that if your net worth is less than 2m USD (or some similar number) then you are dirt poor on RedNote. What’s more, a large portion of the lifestyle on RedNote is actually fake. There is a famous joke that Maserati sold 4,220 cars in China in 2020, yet 7,600 people on RedNote shared their “newly purchased Maserati cars” on RedNote in the same year (I did not verify whether this was true). There are also a lot of fake luxury clothes/handbags (“on RedNote one owns an Hermès birkin bag on average”).
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Because of (1), many people get anxious on Rednote. Just search “小红书 焦虑” (“RedNote anxiety”) and a huge amount of relevant contents will pop up. Scroll for 20mins and you will think you are poorer, uglier, and less successful than everyone else.
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There is a disproportionately large number of Chinese people overseas on RedNote, esp. those in the U.S. and Canada. As such, RedNote has perhaps the best “life in the U.S.” type posts among all Chinese social media. Even for mid-size, not-tourist-heavy cities such as Portland, OR and Salt Lake City, UT, there are a lot of relevant posts. (But if you go down to the level of, say, Boise, ID, then there are very few contents.)
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RedNote is also known as a useful search engine. It might sound ridiculous that a picture/short video platform is viewed by many as the No.1 search engine, but since Google is blocked in China and Baidu returns mostly garbage results, many people have to rely on RedNote. RedNote is especially useful for daily-life issues, such as “how to fix the toilet”. A lot of Chinese people in the U.S. also use RedNote to search for information about life in the U.S., which is kind of weird since Reddit definitely has much more stuff (see (3)). I guess some people just prefer posts in the Chinese language.
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The algorithm of RedNote is super sensitive: say you just searched for “Sichuan travel” once, then it will push such contents to you again and again unless you click “not interested”. Because of this, some say RedNote has the worst echo chamber among all Chinese social media. But on the other hand, once you “raise your account properly” (this is how we say it in the Chinese language), the app will consistently show you posts on topics that you are really interested in.
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Somewhat ironically, many RedNote users themselves consider RedNote toxic and view Reddit as friendly. Just search “Reddit” on RedNote and the resulting posts are very positive in general. People say Reddit is fun, a great place to practice your English, and reflects the U.S. culture well.
Of course, Reddit users only represent a specific group of people in the U.S. (and other mostly English-speaking countries). But that is also the case for RedNote uses in China. I think RedNote really provided an invaluable window for American people (and other people in the West) to see a portion of the lives of regular Chinese people — just like I frequently learn aspects of American culture on Reddit. But again just like Reddit, RedNote only represents a certain subgroup of Chinese people, and its vibe in no way reflects life in China in general.