this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025
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Yeah, this honestly sounds like a press release with made up "users". Definitely part of a marketing campaign.
Everyone I followed on tiktok said they're going to Rednote, and my FYP on rednote is extremely active with tiktok refugees. It's also been the number 1 app on both apple and chrome for 3 days. The users are very real.
Ahahah the eagle with the cat, that's hilarious
That picture is amazing, lol.
Nah, I am on xiaohongshu. Its fucking crazy. Most of the mandarin speaking audience woke up to their app filled with english. There is a running joke on the site now about US citizens "colonizing" the app. It is silly and in good fun but I cannot stress enough how real the influx of users is. Some brits are even moving there because so many Americans they follow did. I have seen multiple chinese citizens have their account jump from a few hundred followers to 30k in an hour or two. I mean you can hop on and see for yourself, it is free. It has actually been really wholesome so far and I hope the vibes continue to be good.
With all due respect, this comment is exactly what a faked "Grass roots marketing campaign" would write. But your account has an extensive post history, so thats a lot more effort than a typical astro turf account.
Also, inflating subscriber numbers and view counts wouldn't be out of the question either, remember Facebook video...
a company that now owns the most talked about app online is not astro turfing on Lemmy.
Signed up myself. Still rebuilding my FYP. Most US users I've seen are TikTok refugees. It picks up quickly though. I see less and less Chinese users and more and more US. Pearlmania is on there, Tizzyent (still kinda unsure if that's a good thing). It's happening.
Would be interesting to see if the Chinese and US communities eventually separate entirely, or if there will remain some significant cross over between them. The article implied significant cross over, but your experience so far seems less so?
Oh the algorithm is very very intuitive. It isn't taking long to connect me with content I like. The Chinese videos are definitely there, but the app is learning and adapting quickly as US content is flooding in
We've been so butt fucked by Russian bots that that good old fashioned internet brigading is seen as suspicious. I truly weap for the world I used to live in.
I even dont think its Russian bots, just plain old capitalism and a general decline in journalistic integrity. Any article that hypes up XYZ, I assume is written by a marketing firm representing XYZ. :(
I just talk like that. Is it so hard to believe that there are plenty of Americans who would flock to a genuinely chinese owned social media out of spite or just bc it is funny? I haven't even seen an ad on the site so I don't think they are making enough money to astroturf nor can I find a reason why they'd want to.
Id question the intelligence of anyone who used any app specifically because of a country associated with it when it's not an app about countries. Going to Chinese apps just because TikTok gets banned is kinda silly imo, but then again I don't use state-sponsored social media like TikTok or instagram etc
I dont mean that your tone is bot like or anything, just that they would want authentic voices.
I do find it hard to beleive, because look at the reddit and twitter transitions. They either took years (bluesky is only barely starting to gain notability, and I'm not convinced that isn't also doing astroturfing) or never happened (Lemmy userbase is a rounding error). Getting people to switch social media is very difficult. And tiktok isnt even banned yet.
Also, just because there are no ads, doesn't mean that no one is propping up the business. Someone is paying to keep the servers running and lights on, and an astro turfing campaign isnt that expensive. Social media companies either grow or die.
So if your liking this new site, power to you, but I suggest you enjoy it while it lasts, because its going to have to become profitable somehow, and that is never good for the users.
That's a non sequitur. The jump from MySpace to Facebook was practically overnight.
Hell, Digg to Reddit as well.
Remember that twiiter was not up against a deadline. There was no reason to move to move quickly.
We just had a supreme Court hearing on tiktok yesterday and it didn't look good for tiktok. That's why this is more sudden.
Why RedNote instead of loops.video or something? I'm not sure how the influencers decided to go there. Maybe that's your conspiracy. Or maybe one person thought of migrating to another Chinese app as protest and other people copied them
My conspiracy, if you want to call it that, is that I dont think article is the product of actual journalism. I think Xiaohongshu has paid for that article to be written, to give the impression that the influencers are moving to it, and its the next tiktok. One of the listed authors has never published anything else, and the site isnt exactly a mainstream news site.
It seems entirely plausible to me that someone that uses tiktok a lot saw enough folks talking about it that they thought it would be an interesting story.
Further I feel like:
are not really the sorts of claims that would exist in an astroturf campaign. I mean maaayybe they wanted it to appear more authentic, so they invited the writer to be more critical and portray the app in a revolutionary light that is pretty counter to it's culture, but I think it's far more likely to be genuine.
Definitely valid points, and I might be wrong. It definitely isnt a super glowing article, but "flocking to" part of the headline struck me as a bit hyperbolic, which is probably the root of my skepticism.
Fair, I think hyperbolic headlines are just the reality of click-driven journalism :\
There is a shopping tab, and ads are allowed as long as it's declared I think. Undeclared sponsored content gets bans.
My phone failed whenever I tried to buy something (just testing to see what it would do), and I haven't seen anything that stood out as an obvious ad.
I suspect it's looking for alipay or wechat or something.
My roommate mentioned it a few days ago, and I found out this evening that her and her girlfriend are both using it. While it may have started off as an astroturf, it's legit now.
Just check it out, the volume of engagement is massive enough the FYP page can get very specific and very recent.
There's even a few Australians like "Yeah, they're not gonna ban the app, but here's a kangaroo"
From the article somebody further up posted up, rednote has had about half a million downloads from app stores in the US.
TikTok's US consumer base is about 136 million if my memory of what was said on NPR a couple mornings ago is accurate.
While I am sure that number will be growing, a lot of the feeling of everybody moving to redhorse appears to be astroturfing.
Like... they had a 50,000 person live event that sounds awfully a lot like like a recruitment seminar/product orientation.
This isn't organic.
As someone who is experiencing it as it happens, it feels like the most organic thing I've experienced on a social media site. I'm sure that a huge part of why I feel the way I do about it is because I'm being served the content I interact with and I mostly interact with english content. However, I see PLENTY of faces I recognize. I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility to say that many americans responded to the tiktok ban with spite and chose an actual chinese social media bc fuck em.
To be clear though, it isn't organic. The American government gave it an impetus.
I get that it is the most organic thing you have ever felt, but that should be itself something that makes you raise an eyebrow.
A foreign language service that does not cater to you, in a language you don't speak, and theoretically has none of your prior data is perfectly catering a social media experience tailored individually to you, and doing it on a level that no corporation who has been targeting and grooming you for 20 years has been able to achieve.
Either your comment itself is inorganic and mere advertising promising impossibilities, or you are a genuine person offering such extreme praise but we need to be skeptical here.
You aren't saying the app is good. You are saying it is the best experience you have ever been provided, and if that is the case, this app has some explaining to do on how they achieved that.
Genuine or not, your thoughts on the matter are weird, so weird that it becomes hard to even respond to.
It really isn't that good at catering to me tbh. I say it feels organic because I am connecting with people in a genuine fashion that feels abnormal for social media. That is likely due to it being very new and the large rapid influx of americans. If it knew me like tiktok did my experience would be very different but it is still good just inna different way. I understand that americans are very hesitant about using chinese software but I can't grasp the source of uneasiness. Its just a social media. I like being able to interact with people so different from me.
It's company advertising for sure, they lose to go after low hanging fruit in order to entrap them and harvest whatever they can without a care for damage they do