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Comment by logancbrown

1 day ago

To directly answer the question, Rednote is not generally used outside China, and the point about these apps being representative of "global" social media apps is false.

Xiaohongshu is used by a lot of huaqiao outside of China. It has a sizeable overseas userbase, but it also has 300M total users.

RedNote was #1 on the App Store download list for a couple of days.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/chinese-app-rednote-hits-1-i...

  • So was this app at one point in time: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/9/21058399/david-dobrik-disp...

    It's called Dispo. You probably haven't heard of it because it became almost irrelevant a few weeks after launch. #1 on the app store doesn't mean a whole lot.

    • RedNote is a bit different: it has been wildly popular in China for a number of years, and the Chinese community has been using it overseas already.

      It may not retain all the new users, but it is not going to become irrelevant.

      1 reply →

  • How many of those downloads originated in China? Genuine question, I read the article and it doesn't say. Apple's App Store is available in China, and China's population alone could be skewing those numbers.

    • App store top apps are per-region. And China one likely even running on completely different infrastructure because CCP.

It received some popularity among TikTok refugees from the US and subsequently also from around the world by users who got curios about what the fuzz was all about.