I tried RedNote. the chinese app is fun, its popularity may not last.

• A Chinese app known as RedNote is growing in new users from the United States.
• I downloaded it and found users happily writing about giving away their data to China.
• The frenzy surrounding RedNote may be short-lived, however.

I spent time on the Chinese app Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, which Americans are flocking to as a potential TikTok ban looms.

It was a fun and completely confusing experience.

The app is flooded with posts mocking the US government. It seems impossible to parse what is potentially propaganda, what ironically pretends to be propaganda, and what are serious complaints about the US government — or serious messages of welcome from Chinese citizens.

What is clear, however, is that many Americans are furious, and they are doing what angry Americans do best from their couches: make memes. One video with over 30,000 likes shows a scene from the movie “Brokeback Mountain” where the two main characters reunite and hug, with the caption “I will be reunited with my Chinese spy.”

Many users joked — using the hashtag “TikTokrefugee” — about giving all their data to the Chinese government. One speculated that RedNote users were assigned a new Chinese spy to watch them.

Overall, my feed was full of dark humor about being fine with giving data to China or using the app”just to say FU to our government,” as one user put it.

Many posts expressed anger at the US government, or at least joy at what people perceived as the government’s embarrassment when it discovered that young people were signing up for an app that could be an even worse national security problem than TikTok.

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Sure enough, RedNote and Lemon 8an app owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance hit the top two spots on Apple’s app store rankings on Monday. I mean, yeah, it’s pretty fun!

Granted, I also laughed at another genre of memes about how people would rather sign up for a questionable Chinese app than switch to Instagram Reels. One video I saw showed a cat labeled “Americans” loudly rejecting a cup of yogurt with the Instagram logo on it.

However, the RedNote frenzy may be short-lived. The app is difficult to navigate for English speakers and it has some new users reported it forbade them (although it is possible that these issues relate to the phone verification system, which I also found to be flawed).

It is also possible that users are downloading RedNote and other Chinese apps not to replace TikTok, but to send a signal to the US government.

“It’s really just retaliation against the government in the simplest way, but in a way that feels very native to Gen Z,” Meagan Loyst, founder of the investor collective Gen Z VCs, my colleagues Dan Whateley and Sydney Bradley told me.

But for a day or two, at least some steam is being released — the frustration that millions of TikTok users feel the app they enjoy is likely to disappear.