Why isn’t there something like Xiaohongshu (aka RED) in the US?
I told one of my non-Chinese friends that I became a content creator on Little Red Book (which is the direct translation of Xiaohongshu, a major social media platform that goes by RED in the US) recently. Her first reaction was, “That is the most Communist-sounding thing I’ve ever heard”. (And then it made me wonder if that’s why Xiaohongshu never entered the US market.)
What is Little Red Book?
There are guesses as to why Little Red Book is called Little Red Book. Some say it came from the origin of the Michelin Guide - Michelin ratings used to be recorded in a “little red guidebook”. Surprisingly, I was able to verify this on the Michelin Guide’s website. Some say it came from an American women's magazine named Redbook (which had its final issue in January 2019, 116 years after its first issue), because it had started out as a platform whose main target audience is women. And some, of course, think that the name has a Communist origin and refers to Mao’s Quotations, a book that everyone knows in China and is actually nicknamed “The Little Red Book” on Google.
Regardless of how the name came about, Little Red Book is, undeniably, one of the most popular and successful social media apps among Chinese today. It was first launched in June 2013. In 2017, 4 years after its initial launch, Little Red Book hit 70 million users. By 2019, that number grew to 300 million. By 2023, the platform boasts over 260 million monthly active users (MAUs), with more than 50 million content creators. (For reference, Pinterest is 14 years old and has 450 million MAUs; Facebook is almost 20 years old and has 3 billion MAUs worldwide.)
Little Red Book went through major shifts in positioning over the years. People outside of China often compare Little Red Book to Pinterest, and it did start out as such. In its earliest days, Little Red Book’s value proposition was “找到国外的好东西” (find good stuff overseas). Today, its slogan is “标记我的生活” (record my life).
What sets Little Red Book apart?
Exactly as its slogan entails, you can post almost anything on Little Red Book: graduation photos, complaints about your next-door neighbor, a question about whether you should study abroad or not (i.e. posts that seek input/help from others), dance videos, food recommendations, career advice, articles, etc. It’s effectively equivalent to Pinterest + Twitter + Substack + Instagram.
There is almost nothing you can’t find on this app. I have a friend who’s coming to the US for her PhD soon, and she was charged an NSF (non-sufficient funds) fee while trying to make her rent payment. She immediately looked it up on Little Red Book and used it to find someone else who had the same experience. “It’s the Wikipedia for international students,” she joked. It reminds me of ChatGPT: you can find the answer to almost anything.
Arguably - and I think this is one of the things that I find most interesting about this social phenomenon - social media apps like Little Red Book and TikTok started a new kind of social media that is not really social media. From a Gen Z perspective, they’re fundamentally different from platforms like WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. We use the latter to stay connected with people we already know (I have to say that, despite Facebook and Instagram’s continuous effort in trying to show me posts from people I don’t follow in my feed, that is not why I use them), but the former to do the exact opposite. There are two things that very well demonstrate the differences between these two types of social media apps: 1) the default page on Little Red Book is “Discover” and not “Following” (on Little Red Book and TikTok, I also just follow very few people), and 2) apps like Little Red Book actually lets you block people you know and a lot of my friends have this turned on so that they wouldn’t be discovered by people they know.
Technology + human psychology
Of course, the success of Little Red Book and TikTok is rooted in the advancements in big data, machine learning, and personalized recommendations in the past two decades. The second week after downloading Little Red Book, I told my friend: The recommendation system of this app is absolutely insane. I was so blown away to the point that I looked up job opportunities on the Search, Ads, & Recommendations team at Little Red Book. I’m so curious: what is their magic? (On the other hand, I don’t think Instagram understands me very well at all…)
Magnates Media made a very interesting video on TikTok a couple of years ago, analyzing TikTok’s insane success. After I started posting content on Little Red Book, I realized that a lot of my friends are content creators on the app as well. From talking to them, it struck me how well this new generation of social media apps understands human psychology (and how much it has, in turn, helped shape human psychology over the years). If you’re a social media user, you may have noticed: it’s so easy to “go viral” on social media these days.
From a human psychology point of view, the fact that anyone can become famous has drastically lowered the barrier of entry and encourages content creation. The platform collects more data, more users are able to find content that is interesting and relevant to them, and more content creators feel inspired to continue content creating. At the end of the day, everyone’s happy. From a technical perspective, platforms like Little Red Book and TikTok have gone incredibly far in solving long-existing challenges, such as popularity bias, in recommendation systems in general.
What I have also noticed, however, is that no one talks about the survivorship bias. The rise of apps like Little Red Book and TikTok created a brand new industry in China termed “We-Media”, which grew from 29.6 billion RMB in 2015 to 250 billion RMB in 2021. What sets this industry apart is that there is practically no barrier of entry, which means that everyone can take a slice of the pie. What people don’t talk about - and what these platforms don’t tell you - however, is that while it’s easy to go viral, it’s not nearly as easy to actually maintain an “influencer career” and consistently stay viral. (You can literally post a one-liner and have it blow up for no reason, which gives you the false impression that being a content creator and making money off of it is so easy. I often see meaningless content that receives thousands or tens of thousands of likes, and I wonder if it’s a strategy that the platform intentionally adopts.)
And I think this is part of why Threads received millions of sign-ups on the first day of launching. Sure, there was already a lot of hype around it and people were dissatisfied with Twitter. But it’s also because a lot of people see a brand new opportunity to become famous, when everyone’s now back on a level playing field, starting from zero.
The future of social media
Little Red Book is still a relatively young social media platform, and it continues to grow at an incredible speed. TikTok is the first Chinese social media company that truly broke out of the Chinese market and became a global phenomenon - it made many people realize that, it doesn’t matter who you are and what your background is, as long as you’re a human, your behaviors and psychology can be predicted to some extent.