America's youth longs for Chinese e-commerce

Who Started The Great Xiaohongshu Migration?

No doubt by now you’ve heard about all the TikTok users moving over to Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, a Chinese TikTok-like short-form video app. But amid all the write-ups and genuinely very funny video roundups circulating the web right now, very little has been written about exactly how China’s version of Instagram became the hottest new app in the US.

Well, before anyone in DC starts claiming this is some socialist psyop to continue the Chinese Communist Party’s nefarious brainwashing of American youth, I can tell you it isn’t. It’s all been totally organic. In fact, it actually started, like most American viral trends, with black TikTok users.

According to Google search caches, accounts such as @the_ronin_sage and @smashleyboyd were first to use the #TikTokRefugees and #rednote hashtags on Monday. And in the case of @smashleyboyd, in her first video about RedNote, she explained that she had already heard about the app because, “all the black girlies were on here talking about how it is over there and it is, indeed, cute as shit over there.”

And this is backed up by TikTok’s own data, which shows that the #xiaohongshu hashtag was being used before this weekend, though only minimally, with about a thousand mentions in the last 30 days. Comparatively, in the last week, interest in the hashtag increased by about 500%. In terms of what people were posting before last week’s Supreme Court hearing, most of the content on TikTok about RedNote was from young women of color sharing trends from RedNote’s beauty community, as well as the app’s art community. In fact, in December, there was a whole little microtrend on TikTok called “POV before you downloaded Xiaohongshu and after you downloaded Xiaohongshu.”

Which makes sense because, while no Chinese app is totally one-to-one with an American one, RedNote has long been the country’s closest equivalent to Instagram. Bloomberg back in May, called the app “part Instagram, part Pinterest,” noting that it was especially popular with rich Gen Z women in China.

After RedNote started getting passed around by young American women of color on TikTok, it finally started to go properly viral on Monday, after it broke out of black beauty communities, as users like @itstypaul made videos that started to get millions of views. By that point, the migration was in full swing. The video from @itstypaul jokes about how the entire app was in Mandarin. And one commenter wrote underneath @itstypaul’s video, “We learned how to code for Myspace, did they really think we wouldn’t learn Mandarin?”

The fact that all of this started with young women of color is not an accident. Nor is it an accident that an obscure Chinese beauty app is the first big beneficiary of the US TikTok ban and not, say, any of the western TikTok clones out there on platforms like Instagram or YouTube. Instagram, in particular, has long been criticized by black women for its biased algorithm and community of white influencers happy to profit off of black content and trends. And adding Reels has not fixed any of those problems. While TikTok has always felt much more welcoming to marginalized communities, even when you account for its own mistreatment of black users. It would be laughable to say that there is no racism or censorship on Chinese social platforms — I mean, c’mon lol — but their algorithms do work differently.

As I wrote on Monday, almost every major Chinese social app is built around “social shopping”. This is why they all emphasize trends over viral one-offs. They want you to buy a product and make content with it to inspire everyone else to make content with it. This is also why they hyper-target your interests so aggressively. But because Americans have no experience with these kind of apps, the impact of TikTok’s algorithm has been different here. Sure, there’s plenty of shopping — Stanley Cups are probably the best, most recent example of the TikTok e-commerce effect. But, as WIRED recently point out, those systems have, perhaps inadvertently, been mainly used in the US to create genuinely supportive filter bubbles for young people, for different subcultures, strange fandoms, and all kinds of other communities. Something western companies like Meta have not ever been able to crack, possibly because, ironically enough, they aren’t nearly as focused on directly selling you shit, and much more interested in selling you to advertisers. And this irony is even more pronounced now that TikTokers are migrating to RedNote, which is, yes, like Pinterest or Instagram, but could more accurately be compared to QVC. And so, just to summarize, because of how stupid it all is: American lawmakers banned a cravenly capitalistic app for being too communist and ended up sending users to an even more capitalistic app. You simply have to stan.

But the pure stupidity of all of this exposes the actual point. American tech businesses know they’re out of step with China. They know they’re losing ground around the world to apps like TikTok and Temu and Shein and CapCut and AliExpress. And American lawmakers naively believe that the American market, the American audience, is valuable enough to be used as a bargaining chip. And they will busy themselves with games of regulatory whack-a-mole while China continues to conquer the rest of the internet.

The following is NOT a paid ad. It’s a good ol’ fashioned promo4promo. If you’re interested in promo swaps OR paid advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

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One Last Real Good TikTok

@momlifestlouis53

The More I Think About The Free Our Feeds Thing The Dumber I Think It Is (lol sorry)

On Monday, I highlighted a new initiative called Free Our Feeds, which is trying to raise $4 million to build an “independent infrastructure” for AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky. They aren’t affiliated with Bluesky and, as far as I know, don’t even have a real endorsement from Bluesky. They’ve raised about $50,000 so far.

As author and tech critic David Gerard wrote, “Just imagine what this could do for the existing real world social network free of billionaire control!, that's extremely distributed and actually decentralized!” Which, if you don’t follow, is a swipe at how AT Protocol isn’t really decentralized. If you want to dig further into the debate around AT Protocol, here’s a big fight about it on Hacker News. But many proponents of decentralization see AT Protocol as a crappy corporate knock-off of ActivityPub, the protocol that runs Mastodon, which, incidentally, just announced its becoming a nonprofit. And you can read more about the fight between Bluesky and Mastodon here if you want.

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko was interviewed about Free Our Feeds, who called it a wasted opportunity for not using ActivityPub. Which I think is right, though I get why no one is trying to raise money to build a Mastodon consortium. Bluesky is popular right now. Mastodon is not.

All that said, I can’t help but think that Free Our Feeds is, at best, doomed to fail/not matter and, at worst, sort of a pointless cash grab. Bluesky is a privately-owned company with a CEO. Hard to imagine a for-profit company would be interested in letting a bunch of third parties set themselves up as the stewards of their protocol, $4 million GoFundMe war chest or not.

Is Elon Musk A Fake Gamer?

There’s been a rumor bouncing around X for months that Elon Musk has been hiring “ghost players” to play as him on games like Diablo, so he can continue to brag about what an epic gamer he is. If you don’t understand why the world’s richest man would allegedly do something this pathetic and lame it’s because Musk decided around 2010 that he could make a lot of money by being a “nerd” and use that as a brand to sell stupid science fiction ideas he can never follow through on to investors.

Anyways, YouTuber Quin69TV released a bombshell video this week arguing that it would be virtually impossible for Musk to be as good at Diablo as he claims to be. But Quin69TV went even further into Musk’s playthrough videos showing fairly definitively that, at the very least, Musk is not the only person using his Diablo account and seemingly might not even know how the game works on a basic level.

There Might Be Another Canadian Convoy On The Way

Remember the “Freedom Convoy,” the weird Facebook movement in 2022, fueled by antivax disinfo that ultimately fizzled out into a whole bunch of nothing? Well, it might be coming back in the form of an “Election Convoy”.

Canadian journalist Luke LeBrun set up a Substack aptly called ConvoyWatch to track far-right activists, who plan to head to Ottawa to protest soon-to-be-former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The most interesting dimension here for Americans, probably, is how this convoy will interect with platforms like Facebook and X, neither of which now have any kind of real factchecking in place. Though, they also have a lot less relevance than they did in 2022.

There’s A Massive Hentai Copyright Lawsuit Brewing

I am going to assume that most Garbage Day readers aren’t massive hentai fans (I need to believe this. Please do not correct me.) And so I also assume that none of you are following a the big lawsuit between massive NSFW manga platform Nhentai and PCR Distributing, which is a company that works as an intermediary between Japanese publishers and western markets. This is all happening amid a massive anime piracy crackdown that’s playing out across the web right now.

PCR recently sued Nhentai, accusing them of hosting copyrighted content. And Nhentai has fired back with a wild challenge to the suit. You can read more about it here, but the big point is that Nhentai has filed emails seemingly proving that PCR, at one point, actually gave Nhentai permission to host their content and even expressed interest in advertising alongside it. Uh oh!

A Good Post

Some Stray Links

• “Biden Administration Quietly Carves TikTok Ban Loophole for Itself” (These fucking guys, man)

• “A Tale Of Two Gooners”

• “Influencers Are Using the Los Angeles Fires to Hawk Wellness Products”

P.S. here’s God’s Sacred Holy Pizza.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***