Has the 'enshittification' of Xiaohongshu (Rednote) begun?
Why platforms destroy the very thing that made them valuable—and what we can('t) do about it
“Xiaohongshu is sacrificing its ‘magazine’ soul to copy Douyin, chasing video’s profits, fundamentally altering its identity and alienating longtime users.”
It’s one of several hundred comments on a recently published WeChat article that has gone viral, arguing that Xiaohongshu (Rednote) is systematically deprioritizing graphic (image/text) content in favor of videos, despite its roots as a platform built on high-quality, image-based posts.
It sent me down a rabbit hole, and now, I’m bringing you along with me.
Key arguments of the article:
1. There’s an algorithmic suppression of graphics
Graphic posts face severe shadow-banning with engagement plummeting
Videos dominate search results, even for traditionally text/image-friendly topics
2. Profit over community
Videos drive higher ad revenue and user retention, aligning with the platform’s "corporate growth" phase.
Graphic content, while beloved, lacks monetization efficiency.
3. “A Silent Phase-Out, Not a Ban”
Xiaohongshu isn’t removing graphics but starving them of traffic, forcing creators to "voluntarily" switch to video.
4. Video isn’t a simple switch, it’s entirely different
Transitioning requires entirely new skills(filming, editing, scripting), alienating long-time graphic bloggers.
5. Cultural cost
Users lament the loss of deep-reading experiences, replaced by "low-effort, noisy videos” optimized for passive consumption.
The user response reveals just how deeply this shift cuts. Among nearly 200 comments, people are divided, but most agree with the author and express their frustration over the rise of video content.
Many users express clickbait fatigue. Endless “DON’T BUY THIS!" video thumbnails and “AI voiceovers" degrade trust and usability.
Some comments highlight creator struggles:
Graphic bloggers feel forced into video despite lacking skills ("I’m a writer, not a filmmaker").
Unfair monetization practices: Unlike Douyin (TikTok), Xiaohongshu doesn’t pay creators directly — videos’ "advantages" are just more brand ad opportunities.
Some blame the decline on "cheap AI mass-producing generic text/image posts", not the platform itself. But there’s a bigger picture. What's happening to Xiaohongshu is part of a predictable pattern that affects every platform competing for attention.
"Enshittification" or more palatably, 'platform decay' is the pattern by which platforms, in the pursuit of profits, destroy the very value that earned them their profit-generating machines, aka, "users", in the first place. Dog biting the hand that feeds it, if you will.
Coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022, 'enshittification' was selected by The American Dialect Society as its 2023 Word of the Year, and it is officially listed in Merriam-Webster and Dictionary.com as a word.
Asking why this pattern is so predictable would be naive.
Asking if it can be solved is equally naive.
Can we solve world hunger?
Yes.
So why don't we?
Profitability.
Until money, fame and power cease to be the driving force of humanity, we will grapple with this issue. And yes, here comes the AI warning: as with every other technology that has promised to conserve our attention and give us back our free time, AI will likely make us more attention-poor, not less. Instead of conserving our attention, these technologies just find new ways to capture and monetize it.
Where does that leave us? If we can't stop the pattern and we can't ignore it, maybe we can start by understanding how we got here — and becoming aware of how we participate in it.
The attention trap
I recently finished Emmy Award-winning MSNBC and podcast host Chris Hayes’ latest book, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource — I’d highly recommend it.
In his book, Hayes points out an inevitable curse that all platforms face:
Since the hard limit for all information technologies is the fixed quantity of our attention, those who want to monetize our attention and those who want to provide a service that conserves that attention end up in a zero-sum fight — with the monetary incentive usually winning out.
In plain terms, a platform like Xiaohongshu was built to save people time by offering detailed product reviews, travel tips, beauty tips etc. so that your attention could be conserved as opposed to the effort you’d spend gathering information manually from many different sources. But, in that process, they (Xiaohongshu and platforms like it) inevitably captured attention, and with this resource now mined, they had the makings of a business model that profits from that attention.
As Hayes notes:
Any product or service that captures our attention is susceptible to this dynamic — if it is good at conserving attention and sustaining focus then it's also a good place to wrench away attention for other purposes. It will eventually be a vector for spam. This is the Law of Physics in the Information Age: You can never defeat spam, only manage it, because spam will exist wherever attention collects.
Take Google as another example. Google's purpose was to make it easier for people to search the internet, conserving attention by delivering relevant results quickly. In doing so, it captured attention and became the most-used search engine, therefore it was able to productize and sell that attention at mind-blowing cost.
Now, nearly two decades after Google Ads launched, I don't think anyone would argue with the statement that Google has become worse and worse as a search engine because of ads (I also think lack of competition played a huge role in Google’s lack of innovation).
The measurement trap
Hayes also points out another important distinction: grabbing attention is entirely different from holding attention.
Grabbing attention is what an ad does — it interrupts, cuts through noise, and is designed to make you stop scrolling for a moment. Holding attention is the essence of what a brand should be — something that occupies space in someone’s mind, even when there is no physical or tangible object in front of them.
Remember this famous quote: “Your brand is what people say about you when you're not in the room."
It was Jeff Bezos who said that. Yet, perhaps he’s forgotten the importance of it because he seems to be funneling money into what you could call a bottomless, attention-grabbing platform. Anyways…back to my argument…
Platforms have every incentive to prioritize grabbing attention.
First, it keeps users cycling through more content faster, driving up time on platform. Second, it made their real customers —advertisers— happy by giving them something they could measure.
For the first time, CMOs could walk into budget meetings with clean Excel sheets showing direct attribution between spending and results. Views, clicks, impressions—these numbers spike reliably when content grabs attention. CFOs finally had the measurable ROI they'd been demanding.
The problem is what this optimization leaves behind. Holding attention is, admittedly, more difficult to track and far less impressive on a spreadsheet. How do you measure the feeling a piece of content gives someone? How do you attribute a decision someone makes months after seeing an influencer post about your product? You can't easily pinpoint and track that moment when something resonates so deeply it sticks with someone and shapes their thinking and drives an action.
I've seen this dynamic play out repeatedly with our own clients. Marketing teams, reporting to CFOs who demand measurable results, are forced to make decisions not based on strategic thinking but on the need to draw clean lines between money spent and numbers generated — regardless of what those numbers actually represent. Spoiler alert, things don’t usually work out well long-term.
This creates a vicious cycle where platforms promote increasingly shallow content because it performs well in the short term. Brands and creators feel forced to abandon quality for quick hits because that's what the algorithm rewards. The result is a deluge of content optimized for grabbing attention rather than providing value — clickbait, outrage, sensationalism, whatever makes someone stop scrolling for three seconds.
A friend recently illustrated this perfectly. They launched a social media channel with incredibly well-produced content that gained millions of views organically. When they asked a platform representative for growth advice, the response was entirely focused on viral tactics — hop on trends, create clickbait thumbnails, chase whatever was getting views that week. Nothing about building an audience that actually cared about their mission. Just more ways to grab attention, temporarily.
Everyone ends up playing a game that degrades the very thing they're competing for.
Brands chase metrics that don't build lasting value. Creators sacrifice their vision for viral moments. And users are left swimming in an ocean of content designed to grab their attention but not worth their time.
It goes without saying, AI is only going to amplify all of this. Platforms will become better at understanding what content is irresistible, tools will allow for the production of that irresistible content on a scale that is unfathomable all the while we will still be glued to our phones doom-scrolling while technology’s promise of “more free time” remains as elusive as it ever was. Enshittification, thriving.
Me, trying to be optimistic
So, is Xiaohongshu really on a fast track to becoming a swamp filled with brain rot? Never say never. But I’m actually pretty optimistic about Xiahongshu’s survival.
Xiaohongshu has struggled for years to monetize. They tried the e-commerce route, but that never really took off, and if their recent partnership with e-commerce giants Tmall/Taobao and JD.Com is any indication, I’d say they’ve acknowledged Xiaohongshu stores won’t be their cash cow.
Where Xiaohongshu does shine is the platform’s content and community. Compared to all other social media platforms, I do think Xiaohongshu is better positioned to fend off enshittification. As Substack writer The Great Wall Street points out in this excellent article, “Why Xiaohongshu (RedNote) Became China’s Default Search Engine for Daily Life”;
“Xiaohongshu reportedly derives about 70% of its revenue from advertising. But this is not the Baidu model of keyword auction spam. This is high-intent, trust-based traffic that converts. The platform doesn’t sell eyeballs; it sells intent filtered through credibility.”
Another important point that this article brings up is that Xiaohongshu has always rewarded quality content, unlike platforms such as Instagram/Facebook:
“Xiaohongshu’s algorithm can resurface content from six months—or even two years—ago, if the user query aligns.
That reduces the cost of content production, increases the lifetime value of each post, and flips the entire “content shelf-life” equation on its head. This is not the 24-hour decay cycle you see on TikTok or Douyin. Xiaohongshu’s posts are more like buried truffles. All you need is the right prompt to dig them back up.
And because older posts stay useful, users trust the platform more. Brands get recurring value. And the platform itself builds a flywheel of increasingly compounding content density.”
So, Xiaohongshu is (well, I hope 🤞🏼) not going to sh*t, how about everything else?
Let me offer another example of a platform (also happens to be a Chinese company) that, in my opinion, has (of course, not perfectly) done its best to avoid enshittification.
For all its flaws, WeChat has managed to maintain a different relationship with user attention. Rather than optimizing for time-on-platform through endless scrolling, WeChat built itself around utility — messaging, payments, mini-programs. Users come to WeChat to accomplish specific tasks, not to be entertained into oblivion. I have deep, deep respect for Allen Zhang, WeChat’s founder, for this.
WeChat's "Moments" feature could easily have become another endless feed optimized for engagement, but it remains chronological and limited — users see a maximum of two ads every 24 hours. Going even further, WeChat has actively protected user experience over the years, going against the trajectory of nearly every other social media platform.
For years, brands could open Official Accounts and send content directly to followers' chat feeds, essentially like newsletters. But within the past year, WeChat first turned off notifications for these messages by default, then moved all Official Account content into a separate folder entirely. Brands no longer appear in your personal chat feed — WeChat chose to protect users' most sacred function, messaging, rather than monetize it further.
Yes, WeChat has added Channels (video content) and live-streaming features designed to capture attention. But these aren't the main experience — users must explicitly navigate to these sections. The core app remains focused on utility, not engagement.
Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) makes money primarily through gaming revenue, not by harvesting every possible second of attention. It's proof that platforms can be profitable without becoming attention vampires.
The point isn't that WeChat is perfect, but that alternatives to the enshittification cycle do exist. They just require different models, priorities and different definitions of success.
Platforms and their profits aside, next on the responsibility ladder: brands & creators
If you're building something on these platforms, you face a fundamental choice: optimize for the metrics the platforms reward, or optimize for what actually builds your business long-term. These are increasingly different things.
The first step is admitting that most of what gets measured and celebrated—views, reach, impressions — doesn't always translate to sustainable success. A viral post that brings you 100,000 views from people who will never think about you again is less valuable than content that resonates deeply with 1,000 people who genuinely care about what you're doing.
But here's the challenge: your team, your vendors, your investors all want to see numbers that look impressive in reports. The platforms make it easy to track attention-grabbing metrics and hard to measure genuine connection. So you need to get intentional about what you're actually trying to build.
Figure out your long-term value. What do you want to be known for? What problem do you solve that others don't? What would make someone seek out your content specifically, rather than just stumble across it?
Yes, you'll inevitably have to play the attention-grabbing game in some way shape and form, it’s unavoidable — I know, it’s grimy and dirty and that’s just reality in the current ecosystem. But create principles and stick to them. Know the difference between occasional tactical moves and losing your identity entirely.
Remember, building reach is not the same as building an audience. If I posted a picture of my a$$ on my LinkedIn, I’d grab attention and get a lot of reach. The next day, if I post an article on Chinese consumer trends, would I have an audience that cares about that topic? No. No, I would not. Colorful example, but you get my point.
A smaller group of the right people who genuinely care about your work is infinitely more valuable than a massive amount of views.
And last but not least, you. Yes, you, scroller, consumer of content, little attention-generating pod. Here’s my advice for all of us…
Choose the broccoli 🥦
I know, it sucks sometimes. Life is stressful, it’s hard, you’ve had a long day and already made a million and one decisions and you pick up your glowing digital portal just to be taken away, to lose yourself for a few moments, to reward yourself — you want the ice cream! But as difficult as it may seem, you’ve got to try and choose the broccoli.
Treat your attention like you treat your diet or fitness — because that's essentially what it has to be. Just as you (hopefully) don't eat junk food for every meal, don't consume junk content all day. The difference is that with content, the consequences are less visible but just as real. I don’t need to tell you — decreased focus, shortened attention span, increased anxiety, and a general sense that nothing you consume ends up satisfying you.
Curate your feed actively. Unfollow accounts that make you feel worse about yourself or waste your time. Seek out creators who challenge you, inform you, or inspire you. Take social media apps off your phone if you have to. Make accessing apps difficult and friction-full instead of frictionless.
Consume quality content deliberately. Support brands and creators who provide genuine value rather than just grabbing your attention. When someone makes you think, feel something meaningful, or genuinely helps you, engage with that content. Share it. Buy from them. Show the algorithm that this is what you want more of.
Choose broccoli.
Thanks for reading! I appreciate your truly valuable attention. To practice what I preach, here are a few links to content that I find genuinely valuable and worth supporting:
Rest of World: A nonprofit publication connecting the dots across a rapidly evolving digital world, through on-the-ground reporting in places typically overlooked and underestimated.
Intrigue Media: Founded by former diplomats and media experts who set out to help our audience make sense of an increasingly complex world of global affairs.
Momentum: Window into China’s brand stories.
The Looking Glass: Essays on the endless journey of building products, teams and ourselves.
Saint Cavish: China told through beautiful stories about food.
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