Comment by ddoolin
16 hours ago
FWIW, this has driven many users to RedNote, which is even more Chinese in every way, regardless of whether it's even the same kind of platform. I doubt it would ever be anywhere near the same numbers as TikTok (assuming ByteDance didn't sell off) but it does illustrate the trouble with this i.e. cat-and-mouse game.
Edited for word choice.
If it reaches more than 1 million monthly active American users, it too can be subject to the same scrutiny under the law in question.
CCP: let's create 200 apps where each app has just less than 1 million active; and then cross-content across the apps so you are sort of browsing a single site. Maybe China will finally bring federated social media.
It runs and operates outside US. How exactly would you enforce the ban? Seize the domain?
> runs and operates outside US
…same as TikTok. Removed from app stores.
I don’t know the details of this app’s corporate structure, but if it’s developed here and user data stays here it would not qualify under the act. Based on the context of your and other comments I assumed it was also a foreign-controlled app
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They will levy fines on google and apple if they don't remove it from their stores.
This is very misleading "news" and it doesn't illustrate anything, a bunch of users installed rednote out of protest, but this is a fully chinese app with 100% chinese content and 99% of users will move to youtube, instagram, etc
Fake news.
Looks like you have never used TikTok or RedNote.
Chinese users are starting to caption their videos in English. American users are posting regularly.
It is the number 1 app in my country right now, because of the TikTok ban.
Look up the playstore and you will see. Download it for yourself and you will see.
According to CNN, roughly 700,000 people have installed Rednote—though that figure only represents those who have tested the app and doesn’t necessarily reflect sustained usage. By comparison, TikTok is said to have around 110 million users in the United States, meaning 700,000 installs amount to less than 1% of TikTok’s user base.
Meanwhile, YouTube’s user numbers in the U.S. are estimated at 240 million, but it’s unlikely to gain many new downloads since almost everyone already has the app.
In my view, it’s unrealistic to think Rednote will replace TikTok.
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Considering that RedNote doesn't allow LGBTQ+ content or "too much skin" to be shown (women-only policy BTW) I don't think it'll end up being very popular with today's TikTok crowd.
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> It is the number 1 app in my country right now, because of the TikTok ban.
This is like the Mastodon spike when Elon bought Twitter. It doesn't mean anything.
Rednote has been shown as the top free app (per Apple’s own App Store in my device at least) for going on a week, so the magnitude may be larger than you imply.
Also, having tried it myself, the algorithm works much like TikTok whereby it learns to show English speakers English content pretty quickly.
Also the general consensus among people who have used IG and TikTok (I personally don’t use IG) seems to be that the former does not at all substitute for the latter, particularly in terms of the subjective “authentic” feel of the content (IG often said to be lacking the community feel of TikTok).
I will bookmark this and come back in 6 months. I have seen too many "platform X is replacing playform Y" hype cycles to write long essays about this.
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This may be because RedNote is going to "wall off" US users from the Chinese ones:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/rednote-may-wall...
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Anecdotally, I can tell you that everyone in my kid's circle of friends at school moved over to it within the course of a week.
A non-trivial number of videos I've seen this week mention also being able to find the creator of said video on Rednote. It is also the number 1 downloaded app in the US iOS store this week. The news may be a logical extreme, but it's not fake.
Having a non-trivial number of videos is not the same as being the replacement platform. Youtube is also being spammend with tiktok users uploading old content. The idea that after the dust settles the majority of 110 million tiktok users will end up using a tightly censored chinese social media platform rather than moving to obvious alternatives such as instagram and youtube seems very very unlikely.
Yeah, it's the same with the "millions" of users moving to bluesky or reddit moving to lemmy. A bunch of people go there and eventually come back.
It's not ostensibly, it's an app completely focused on china; did you mean a different word?
Probably. I didn't know that about it when I used that word, but a sibling comment also confirms this, so thanks for the correction.
It asserts how critically powerful platform media is now and that the government sees it as an essential part of managing their citizens
I agree. I'm not sure if I think all of this is good or not. Even if you, a gov't, didn't have an interest in managing your citizens vis-a-vis some platform, it doesn't mean other govt's don't have that interest, so maybe there's some validity to it in that case. But all of that raises even more questions, like "so what?" and "to what end?"
Sure, guy, and Bluesky will become the new Twitter.
A lot of my friends have stopped using twitter and have started using Bluesky.
I feel like the protest move to RedNote will be short lived. The censorship there is draconian - if you say even the slightest thing that offends the CCP on red note, you get banned. See this discussion on the subreddit for TikTok (https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTok/comments/1i2wll3/how_to_not_...).
Something I read that’s interesting - RedNote changed the English name to cover their actual name - the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true).
> the Chinese name is little red book, as in the red book of Mao (not sure if true)
That is the Chinese name of the app (although I've heard mixed reports on if "little red book" as a term for the book actually common in China). The founder claims it's because of the founder's "career at Bain & Company and education at the Stanford Graduate School of Business" which both use red, but I'm pretty sure it's a pun on his name also being Mao.