When I try to think through why Xiaohongshu as a platform has always felt weird to me, I realize that it might just be a reflection of what the internet would look like if the logic of contentification completely dominates how we interact with others and perform ourselves online. If platforms have a language, just like LinkedIn speaks corporate, Xiaohongshu speaks influencer.
That is to say, what Xiaohongshu makes visible is an extreme form of what most platforms now encourage: the transformation of everyday presence, thought, feeling, and identity into consumable content. You don’t speak like you normally would, but like a content creator: algorithmically optimized, readily packaged, neatly formatted with all the right emojis (here’s a hilarious parody). Now, as someone who used to be quite ‘aggressively online’ – we all perform our digital self, sometimes with some algorithmic considerations. But as someone who began to use the good old BBS around 2001, blogging since 2004, Douban since 2005, Twitter since 2008, and Weibo since 2010, I do think the logics of that performance have changed quite a bit.
The ‘digital public sphere’ and the ‘follow’ button
The BBS forums back in the days were not called ‘social media’, probably because there was no ‘following’ function. You join topic-based discussions where some usernames might have some reputation, but the thread is always the center of attention, not the person. The ‘following’ function, which media researchers would call an affordance, changed everything. Focus began to be shifted from topic to persona; relatively horizontal exchange of ideas began to shift towards the cultivation of visibility, identity, and hierarchy. Unlike the old forum, you begin to have an ‘audience’, and even subconsciously, you begin to write for that audience and are tempted to cultivate engagement.
Despite that, the early Twitter and Weibo (to some extent, more on this later) felt somewhat like public sphere. I think the publicness lay in the fact that digital presence was not entirely instrumental. There was an assumption, however limited or flawed, that being present and thinking aloud with others had value in itself, not just as a means to gain influence or traffic. Maybe you just had a thought or read something interesting and wanted to know what others were thinking; you could share personal life experience without having to package it as a product (I’ll get to what sharing looks like on XHS later); discovery seemed organic rather than completely governed by algorithms; ideas seemed to matter more than profiles.
(By the way I met my husband on our university BBS forum 20 years ago. It’s funny that although BBS wasn’t considered social media, the sociality can be more ‘real’ than today’s platforms buried under bots, ads, and clickbaity takes)
The platform logics of Weibo, however, were different from Twitter from the very beginning. I wrote about this in this blog post (in Chinese) already in 2011. Weibo from the start was more hierarchical and driven by celebrity effect and later the ‘big Vs’ (V for verification). The post structure on Twitter was flat, whereas it was organized by posts and comments on Weibo, and comments visibility was linked to power distribution. Weibo had tiered verification system, media parterships, and moneitization mechanisms early on. Whereas Twitter seemed to resist this for quite some time, it eventually fully adopted the Weibo model.
I also think the professionalization of content creation (often known as self-media 自媒体) in China is on a different level. Since as early as the mid-2010s, MCNs (multi-channel networks, firms that ‘manage’ influencers) have created industrialized pipelines moving from ordinary people to micro-celebrities to moneitized brand within months. In that sense, the rise of XHS feels like the natural endpoint of this – the full convergence of platform capitalism, consumer culture, and personal branding in a vast and highly saturated digital media ecosystem.
Performing the useful self on Xiaohongshu
It’s particularly interesting to observe ‘academic’ Xiaohongshu, especially the kind of content that’s algorithmically most successful or gaining most traffic. The most popular type is career/life advice: ‘top tips’ on how to find a PhD advisor, how to complete your PhD, how to find a job, how to present on an academic conference, how to get published, so on and so forth. Another type is ‘life itself’ as consumable spectacle, as in ‘a day in the life of a lecturer in the UK’. Even the posts that are just sharing books have sensationalist, news-like titles, like ‘How an Oxford professor decodes contemporary China with precision (牛津教授如何精准解码当代中国)’.
Typical academic responses to current affairs on twitter/bluesky would be ‘here’s what I think about this’: analysis, thoughts, ‘hot takes’. Yes it’s about visibility and curating of the self too, but a different kind of self. On XHS the typical response is often – again, concrete advice for the audience: what *you* can do about this – here are five paper ideas you can develop based on these events. If academic visibility on twitter/bluesky is more about performing your thinking self – a public intellectual role, on XHS it’s more about performing your useful self, a resourceful and entrepreneurial life coach.
I suppose some people do genuinely benefit from it and I’m not suggesting one is inherently better than the other. It’s not the substance of the advice, but the form and language in which it’s presented that feels really alienating to me. The instrumentalization of all aspects of life is too ubiquitous. The language too formulaic and templated. It’s a vision of online presence where every sharing of one’s experience or thought has to be offered as a product, immediately consumable and useful for your ‘audience’, and algorithmically optimized.
If this the only game in town?
Text-based social media feels like a lost cause now. The old-fashioned ‘I’m just posting thoughts and ideas’ behaviour perhaps looks incredibly irrelevant, if not stupid, to younger users. Between ads and fascists, X is also weirdly reminiscent of Facebook with all those ‘10 most amazing places on earth you’ve never heard of’ threads posted by professional (or AI-outsourced) content makers. Bluesky and other federated networks may try to reclaim some of that lost horizontality, but there’s a fatalist mood that the contentification of everything is inevitable. The argument often goes that ‘it will either remain too small to make any difference, or it’ll become big enough that it turns into Twitter’.
For some reason, Douban remains something of an outlier. As one of the oldest social media platforms in China (established in 2005), it still carries the infrastructure of an earlier internet: interest-based communities, semi-anonymous interactions, the non-instrumentality of being in conversation and sharing. I’m counting it as social media as you can ‘follow’ each other, and certain ‘influencers’ did emerge in these communities, but it hasn’t become a space of personal branding. I don’t know why – maybe it’s just accidental, a product of user loyalty and, perhaps, the idealism (or inertia) of its owners. But I like the fact that it’s the proof that a different culture of digital presence and engagement is possible.
In the long run, we’re all dead. While things are still usable, I suppose, we may as well use them, and even dare creating new things, rather than being indulged in the imagination of a doomed future.
Chenchen Zhang 