All posts tagged: Rednote

The Chinese App That Puts Instagram to Shame

The Chinese App That Puts Instagram to Shame

Published by skeptic

I’m writing to you from Dali, a city in China’s Yunnan province nicknamed “Dalifornia” because of its reputation as a haven for burned-out tech workers, artists, and wanderers looking to disappear for a while. I couldn’t be much further from the spectacle happening in Beijing, where US President Donald Trump was making his first state visit to China since 2017. Here, my DiDi driver softly sings along to old karaoke ballads as we pass rice fields and mist-covered mountains. Dali isn’t the version of China most foreign visitors imagine when they think of megacities filled with gleaming skyscrapers, high-speed trains, and hyper-efficient delivery networks. Over roughly the last decade, Dali has become a magnet for a certain type of young Chinese urbanite exhausted by the pressure cookers of places like Beijing and Shanghai, where the competition for good jobs is cutthroat and housing prices remain staggeringly high despite the country’s recent property downturn. The ancient city is now dotted with vintage stores, trendy cafés, ceramic studios, tattoo parlors, and DIY art spaces—the aesthetic markers of …

Rednote Draws a Line Between China and the World

Rednote Draws a Line Between China and the World

Published by skeptic

Some Rednote users have reported that their accounts were automatically converted from the Chinese to the international version of the website recently. One American user, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid being punished by the platform, shared a screenshot with WIRED showing that when he logged into the platform in April, a banner appeared that read “Your account is a rednote account. We have automatically redirected you to rednote.com.” The user says he registered his account with a Chinese phone number years ago, but suspects his account was converted because of using a non-Chinese IP address. “I have never posted from China. It’s always been in the United States. Obviously, in one glance, they can see this is an American posting in English,” he says. Looming Split After TikTok sidestepped a US shutdown by selling a majority stake in its American business, most of the “refugees” who had fled to Rednote went back to the video app or to other platforms. Those who stayed often did so because they value reading about and talking …