Unofficial Rules of the Road for Americans on Rednote

Last month, a wave of TikTok users flocked to Rednote (小红书) during its short-lived ban in the US, coalescing under the hashtag #TikTokRefugee. The Chinese social networking platform subsequently topped US mobile app store charts, and the predominantly Chinese-speaking and China-based users on Rednote welcomed their foreign visitors. As the latest episode from the 新新人类 Pixel Perfect podcast points out, this was very much an unexpected moment as Chinese companies typically create separate apps for domestic and international audiences. (The most prominent example is Lemon8, a Rednote clone created by the company behind TikTok for international audiences.) And so, those of us who opened Rednote during that fateful week were privy to a rare moment where American users were welcomed into the Chinese internet — and schooled publicly on the do’s and don’ts there.

Throughout this brief period, I downloaded and installed Rednote from a US app store to open a new account on my smartphone to witness these welcoming messages, as well as explanations of how to best use Rednote. Below is my informal record of what advice was given in the 38 welcome videos that I watched, ranked from most to least frequently mentioned, with a minimum of two mentions. Note that this is far from an exhaustive study — my sample happens to be the introductory videos that caught my eye when I opened the app.

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Pay your cat tax (7 mentions)

This humorous rule says that new users coming in from TikTok must pay a toll to enter Rednote, and that toll takes the form of a cat video or picture. Most articles online suggest this was a spontaneous, word-of-mouth phenomenon with no clear origin story. Yet in my research, I found a TikTok user in China (@chinesewithfan_meow) who claims her viral video might have started it all. In her video on Rednote, she says that she didn’t invite the idea, but that her video on TikTok just happened to catch people at the right place and time. Indeed her video on TikTok did garner over 150,000 likes, 2000+ comments and over 6000 shares (and she only has a follower base of 10.1k at the time of writing after her viral success).

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No offensive comments or DMs (5 mentions)

Videos range from general pleas to not make offensive comments “against the rules,” to specific mentions of rude DMs (direct messages) . One riled up user told people not to be racist, after seeing a post greeting Chinese people with “konnichiwa” (hello in Japanese) and making jokes about “colonizing” the app.

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Don’t talk about politics (5 mentions)

Some Rednote users were direct about this, while others were more circumspect. One person bluntly told their audience to not “touch on sensitive topics like politics, leave it alone, unless you want grandpa to chase after you.” Another stated plainly that there is a “content surveillance system, [so] do not post sensitive content.” Less direct was the video that visually displayed the text “no talking about 🇺🇸🇨🇳” on top while the audio track talked about protecting the platform and its creators.

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Include Chinese subtitles (4 mentions)

Variations from telling people to add subtitles to showing people how to use machine translation to make them easily.

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Learn Chinese/Mandarin (4 mentions)

Beyond subtitles, some frustrated Chinese users urged their American brethren to learn some spoken Mandarin, and in one case, exhorted them to memorize some basic Chinese internet slang written with numbers or Latin alphabet acronyms.

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Express yourself authentically (4 mentions)

This was a sentiment that came through on multiple videos, and while it’s nothing unique, it felt reflective of the lifestyle influencer vibe that permeated many videos.

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No flirting or harassment (3 mentions)

I’m placing this as a separate rule from no offensive comments or DMs because it feels tied to Rednote’s reputation as a woman-dominated platform. The most strident (and eloquent) example I found proclaimed that there is “zero tolerance on Rednote” for harassment, told people to call them out and report them, and to “let our local girls help you, we are going to help you to curse those suckers in a language they understand.” Another video affirmed this by declaring that Rednote is a “safe space for women.” And lastly, a milder video simply chided people to “not use DM for flirtation.”

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No naked (or half naked) pictures (3 mentions)

Users differed on whether the rule was strictly about nudity or whether a shirtless or bikini photo would qualify as well.

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Use emoji correctly (3 mentions)

These comments were mostly about how people were misusing Rednote’s custom emoji (小红薯表情包) and mistaking sly or ironic expressions as earnest. For example, the emoji below is not used as a normal smile, but as a forced, probably annoyed, smile.

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No cussing (2 mentions)

Reminders that people shouldn’t swear on Rednote.

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That’s it for our little compilations of unofficial rules! As you can see, the most frequently mentioned rule, pay your cat tax, was only present in 7 of 38 videos. So for the most part, the welcome videos were simply that: efforts to welcome new people onto the platform and introduce some of the norms. If anything, it’s clear that RedNote has a very different culture from TikTok, and we’ll see over time if the platform truly takes hold in the US or if it was a brief cultural moment.

To learn more about this so-called #TikTokRefugee phenomenon, we recommend reading Yiwen’s article Chinese internet as an identity, and listening to 新新人类 Pixel Perfect’s episode on How did the TikTok refugees end up on Xiaohongshu? (Mandarin audio only). And remember, if you enjoyed this post, we’d appreciate a cat GIF or two.

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An Xiao Mina contributed editing to this article.