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If there's any equivalent to Reddit in China, it has to be Rednote. Rednote is Chinese social media app that was started in 2013. On the surface, Rednote appears to be another Chinese Tiktok-style social media, with very video-centric content. However, the similarity with Tiktok ends there.
At its core, Rednote is an information/content discovery platform. Users typically post their experience of goods and services there, serving as a guide to other users. Users can also ask questions and get answered. Rednote is where Chinese people go to find travel advices, product reviews, restaurants, handyman services and etc. It's basically Reddit on steroids. Unlike Reddit, it is built to be a native shopping/advice-based social media platform.
Rednote shares remarkable similarities to Reddit despite both featuring opposite media types- text vs video.
\- Both platforms draw high search intent audience. Both platforms prioritize clean, sanitized and high quality content over viral content farming.
\- Both platforms have a culture of being polite to other users and avoid toxicity (though Rednote does not have a karma system to enforce that, while Rednote tends to rely on algo to push user content that is friendly). Both platforms are also anti-brain rot content, though Reddit is more so. So you tend to not see a lot of stupid tiktok dancing videos there.
\- Both platforms have become the go-to for information and advices instead of Search Engines. Though Rednote is far developed in this area. Rednote Search is widely used and is directly used as a search platform instead of going through a Search Engine like Google.
\- Both platforms are laggards compared to mainstream social media. Both grow their users steadily and slowly over time as they tend to be more context-heavy and reading driven, which makes it harder to attract users. Users also tend to provide high-quality content and discussion. Therefore, attracting the right users is important. To illustrate this point, it is useful to know that Rednote came before Tiktok but is still 7 times smaller than Tiktok in user count.
\- Both platforms value authenticity and user experience. They tend to avoid influencer or personality driven narratives like seen on Tiktok and Instagram.
\- While rednote does not have the equivalent of subreddits, they have hashtags that work very well. Just click on the hashtag relevant to what you want to search further, and you will find a lot more similar post to it.
However, as a business model, Rednote seems to hold significant advantage over Reddit. Rednote users are very open to being advertised and marketed to. For instance, marketers may pose highly detailed guides and users tend to benefit from it and are receptive. However, such attempts on Reddit will face immediate backlash. Rednote users are also not merely research driven like Reddit users, they also have very strong shopping intent, which makes them very good for lower-funnel opportunities. Like Titkok, Rednote also does e-commerce. Rednote Search is also vastly superior to Reddit. Because it is a visual-first platform rather than text, users tend to spend much more time there and posts get very strong engagement. It is common that users make and post really high quality graphic guides there. Any product/location that goes viral on Rednote will blowup in real life. Rednote users are not cynical like Reddit users, making them much easier to be marketed to.
Rednote is also different from Reddit in certain ways. Rednote is not a community-based platform, so echo chamber is not a problem there, but it also has less influence in non-shopping related areas whereas Reddit's influence is stronger in many other areas like investing, news, politics, sports, and etc. Rednote is also less anonymous compared to Reddit as they need to be verified, though users can remain completely anonymous (except their location) to other users. Rednote is also primarily app-driven and does not feature on Search engines.
Further comparison between Reddit and Rednote:
|Category|Reddit |Rednote|
|:-|:-|:-|
|DAU|130 million |120 million++|
|MAU|500 million++|350 million++|
|Revenue|$3.2 billion (est. 2026)|$6.2 billion (2025)|
|Net Profit|$1 billion (est. 2026)|$3 billion (2025)|
|Platform search queries|80 million users / week|600 million search queries / day|
|Audience|USA & overseas English-speaking communities |China & overseas Chinese communities|
|E-commerce?|No|Yes|
|Livestream shopping?|No|Yes|
|Games, In-app development|Yes|No|
As you can see, Rednote appears to be much more successful across multiple areas, such as revenue generation, number of app users, search queries, and e-commerce. This is despite Rednote's users (China, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Philippines) being far less affluent compared to Reddit's users (USA, UK, Australia, Canada). Developed vs developing. This is because Rednote is conceived as a native shopping-oriented platform, it is meant to be commercialized.
Though this is not to say Rednote will always be better than RDDT. RDDT has other opportunities like data licensing and can slowly incorporate features from Rednote. Reddit's discussion quality across different topics except for shopping-related remain far superior to Rednote in depth and breadth.
Source:
[https://www.tradingview.com/news/cryptobriefing:7557b5753094b:0-xiaohongshu-aims-for-hong-kong-ipo-by-year-end-seeks-70b-valuation/](https://www.tradingview.com/news/cryptobriefing:7557b5753094b:0-xiaohongshu-aims-for-hong-kong-ipo-by-year-end-seeks-70b-valuation/)