User:Lucinda0516/Xiaohongshu

Xiaohongshu is a social media and e-commerce platform created by Miranda Qu and Charlwin Mao in June 2013, with the slogan “tag your life”. It started as an online tour guide for Chinese shoppers, initially intended to provide an information platform for like-minded users to review products and to share their overseas shopping experiences with the community.

With continuous development, nowadays this app allows users, celebrities, and KOLs (Key Opinion Leader) to post and share product reviews, travel blogs, as well as lifestyle stories via short videos and photos with tags, to follow well-known personnel, and to purchase international products directly from RED Store.

According to the official annual report of Xiaohongshu, cosmetics, travel, fashion, culture and entertainment, and food are the top five most-popular categories within the community; the top five categories gaining popularity are education, photography, sports, technology and digital products, and house and home. According to Xiaohongshu’s official website, People’s Daily announced it to be one of the world's largest community e-commerce platform in 2017. Aiming to cover and improve all aspects of users’ life, Xiaohongshu has attracted over 300 million users, 70% of which are from Generation Z, over 80% are female. Moreover, its monthly active users reached 100 million with over 3 billion posts being viewed every day.

Similar to posting on Facebook, Xiaohongshu users can interact with others via “like”, “collect”, and “comment” buttons. The number of likes, collects, and comments are real-time feedback and are visible to all users. In this game, when users participate by posting a well-written note on Xiaohongshu, they will probably desire “multiple future outcomes” (Malaby, 2017), such as accumulating likes and collects from others as positive feedbacks to their posts. Moreover, Xiaohongshu well applies the media logic, in which popularity fosters further popularity (Bucher, 2012). When users search for a keyword on Xiaohongshu, the relevant posts are mostly displayed according to the quantity of likes and collects. The more likes a user has gain, the higher possibility of visibility on the homepage. To interact in such a sharing community, the feedback represents the quality and popularity of users’ posts, to the extent of whether a user is accepted by others. Thus, to “win” likes, collects, and followers are the shared rules on this gamified platform; they can be seen as rewards and goals for actors, and simulate users’ “behavioral change (Bucher, 2012)” and developing skill sets.

Xiaohongshu sets up a level-up system, making the game more playful. As “Hongshu” is pronounced similar to sweet potato, a cartoon image of sweet potato is created to represent users. Each beginner is titled “diaper sweet potato”—the green-hand level of Xiaohongshu users. Users can fulfill certain tasks to “level up” as well as to advance to a new title, such as “smart sweet potato” and “gold sweet potato”. Tasks including writing more posts, gaining more likes and collects, and posting video notes with tags. In such a gamified way, users are encouraged to produce high-quality contents in the long-term and to interact actively with other users. Gamification of Xiaohongshu contributes to the high DAU (daily active users) and waves of data on the platform.