Author | Wu Xianzhi, Wen Yehao

Editor | Wang Pan

At present, AI is sparking a grassroots, decentralized revolution.

Programming, once a specialized skill, has now placed its innovative power into the hands of ordinary people. Now, anyone with an idea can create a functional AI application in a remarkably short time.

This revolution has also revealed a significant gap in China’s domestic tech ecosystem: the absence of a tech community capable of supporting widespread innovation.

Chanji Venture once attempted to introduce Silicon Valley’s elite incubation model to China. However, for fostering mass innovation, professional communities often struggle to adapt. They fail to accommodate the raw, unrefined ideas and wild experiments thriving outside their formal structures.

Against this backdrop, a somewhat paradoxical yet realistic situation has emerged: the void in China’s innovation ecosystem is ultimately being filled by content platforms.

Bilibili, known for its strong learning culture, has become a hub for AI video creation and is now surrounded by a wealth of AI tutorials. The recent open-source project ‘Nu Wa.skill’ by a Bilibili uploader sparked widespread discussion in the industry.

Jike, on the other hand, functions more like an industry break room, gathering a dense concentration of professionals where industry news and gossip circulate. However, its capacity is largely limited to information exchange and socializing.

Now, Xiaohongshu, a community originally unrelated to tech, has also become a major gathering place for AI discussions. With low barriers to entry and a strong sense of human presence, it attracts attention for both ambitious projects and grassroots innovations.

Ultimately, what China’s AI scene lacks today is not just models, capital, or top talent, but ‘oxygen’—a space where less experienced individuals feel empowered to try, where immature products can gain visibility, and where innovation doesn’t have to prove its greatness immediately but can simply breathe and find its footing.

Xiaohongshu's Unique Strength: Interesting Souls

When Xiaohongshu ventured into tech, its first move wasn’t to showcase its strength but to acknowledge its lack of proper tools.

This decision was born out of necessity. By the time Xiaohongshu formally expanded into tech content, other players had already carved out segments like news, tutorials, and industry discussions.

In such a competitive landscape, trying to compete by following others’ rules—doing tutorials or news—would only lead to failure. Moreover, these areas are inherently challenging businesses: tutorials often end up selling courses, and news becomes PR copy, neither fitting well with Xiaohongshu’s community vibe.

So, Xiaohongshu simply chose not to engage in that fight. Instead of doing news or tutorials, it opted to play by its own rules rather than compete on others’ turf.

However, Xiaohongshu had always been a lifestyle community, lacking a tech content category or the corresponding technical DNA, atmosphere, and content accumulation. If it forced its way into the tech space, it would have had almost no leverage.

Fortunately, Xiaohongshu had one major advantage: 350 million active users.

While the vast majority may have nothing to do with tech, this doesn’t stop millions of tech professionals from leading double lives there.

On weekdays, they might be engineers or algorithm experts at major companies, but on Xiaohongshu, they could be cat lovers, food bloggers, or fitness enthusiasts, sharing sunsets in the Bay Area or photos of their braised pork while never mentioning their jobs.

And this is precisely an untapped goldmine—Xiaohongshu doesn’t need to fight for so-called tech elites or influencers; it just needs to awaken the other identities of users already in its community.

Thus, Xiaohongshu didn’t splash out on buying traffic or inundate the platform with industry bigwigs. Instead, it quietly added a ‘Technology’ tag and gave a slight traffic boost to notes discussing AI and tech—and an ‘avalanche’ followed.

Data shows that over the past year, as one of the fastest-growing content categories on the platform, Xiaohongshu's tech content publishing has grown by over 100% year-on-year, while the creator base has expanded by over 200%.

This wasn’t some ‘crossover’ miracle but a long-overdue homecoming.

On the other hand, unlike other content communities that favor heavy attributes like professional depth and hardcore content, Xiaohongshu's tech atmosphere is lighter and places greater emphasis on creativity and fun. This is fully reflected in its recent Xiaohongshu Hackathon.

This year’s Xiaohongshu Hackathon had the theme ‘48 Hours to Build a Big Toy for the World,’ and participants weren’t just the usual programmers and geeks but included a more diverse group, such as kids, liberal arts students, and music enthusiasts.

As a result, the hackathon produced quite a few seemingly useless yet eye-catching and fun ‘demos.’

For example, there was a smart seat cushion that not only monitors sedentary behavior and posture but also automatically ‘farts’ as a warning when the user sits too long, turning a gentle health reminder into a public spectacle. Another creation was a ‘Mahjong God Machine’ equipped with a robotic arm, allowing remote friends to join a mahjong game from afar, solving the age-old social dilemma of ‘three players short of one.’

Of course, as products cobbled together in 48 hours, they had plenty of flaws. Take the ‘Mahjong God Machine,’ for instance—someone jokingly pointed out its slow movements and high latency: ‘If we played at my house, my grandma would scold it to death.’

The products themselves might be riddled with issues, but ‘fun’ is a value in itself. And behind that ‘fun’ are vibrant, highly creative individuals.

A Xiaohongshu community executive told Photon Planet: ‘At this point, trying to match products to demand is slow. We think it’s more important to find the innovative people—they respond to demand faster than we can understand it.’

This is why Xiaohongshu shifted from ‘evaluating projects’ to ‘evaluating people’ this year.

After all, projects built in 48 hours are inevitably immature, but those 48 hours reveal a person’s creativity, problem-solving skills, and teamwork abilities.

This reflects a forward-looking judgment: in the AI era, technological iteration speeds exceed anyone’s imagination. Today’s hottest project could be obsolete tomorrow; today’s top product could be replicated the next day. The only constant is human creativity.

Thus, focusing on ‘people’ is becoming the core logic of Xiaohongshu's tech ecosystem.

Aiming to Be a Connector

Organizing the hackathon may be just one aspect of Xiaohongshu's efforts to connect with the AI industry. Before this, many AI innovators, investors, and product people were already active on Xiaohongshu.

One hackathon participant put it well: ‘I have two sides on Xiaohongshu—A-side is appreciating good-looking people, B-side is AI coding.’

When people gather, a community’s ‘functions’ naturally unlock. An AI entrepreneur from a major company showed us the content he posted on Xiaohongshu over the past six months, mainly two types: updates on his DIY AI products and job listings.

Unlike other job postings, his recruitment interface looked very ‘simple’—just a hiring image and a few lines of text. For example, a job posting for an Agent developer seemed incredibly basic, with low interaction rates, but in reality, most interactions happened via private messages.

‘It’s efficient. Actually, it’s not just for recruiting for my own projects—I used Xiaohongshu to recruit for Chanji Venture before, and some backend work also relied on Xiaohongshu,’ the developer said. While general recruitment software excels at mass applications, AI projects require more precise screening, and Xiaohongshu fills this ecological gap.

Another notable aspect is the ‘sense of human presence’ frequently mentioned by innovators. Whether recruiting, evaluating projects, or even the vast majority of viral AI industry notes, they all ultimately center on people.

‘I can open the homepage of someone who messages me and quickly see if their expertise matches mine,’ one innovator said. In their view, Xiaohongshu helps ‘heroes recognize heroes.’ Even more viral content stems from personality contrasts.

We learned that a significant portion of viral AI content on Xiaohongshu is created by teenagers and homemakers. Such content goes viral largely due to the democratization of AI. When a middle school student or homemaker builds an Agent to automate work tasks, AI truly feels within reach for ordinary people.

Xiaohongshu is also intentionally following this trend and expanding its community infrastructure's content-carrying capacity. Over time, the community has introduced features like long-form posts with images, audio, and medium-length videos to match user needs.

A Xiaohongshu executive noted that connection comes in many forms, not just through content types. Features like document attachment uploads, for instance, have inadvertently fueled discussions around professional AI papers.

As a ‘connector,’ Xiaohongshu must link the entire industry’s upstream and downstream, ensuring every stakeholder gets what they need.

What we’ve seen so far is somewhat similar to a domestic alternative to Twitter, but Xiaohongshu is also exploring deeper areas, such as hosting themed events for target groups. For example, hackathons connect innovators and mobilize AI-related creators, investors, and media resources. Its collaboration with SIGIR, a top conference in information retrieval, has significantly boosted academic discussions within the community.

Such deep content was previously difficult to match, heavily reliant on closed networks. ‘You’d need to attend industry conferences or study someone’s papers to learn this, but the community can provide these links. The hackathon also offers a space for entrepreneurs to find partners and co-founders,’ the executive explained.

From the hackathon, we see Xiaohongshu's attempt to introduce fresh energy. The judges’ list included Liu Jingkang, founder of Insta360; Cao Xi, founder of Monolith; and Feite, head of strategy and investment at Xiaohongshu.

Xiaohongshu's AI Aspirations

The day before the hackathon, WeChat announced a ban on AI-generated official accounts, following Xiaohongshu's lead.

A Xiaohongshu executive's response reflects the platform's unique understanding of AI. He believes that ‘doing tech’ and ‘doing AIGC’ are two different things. Xiaohongshu advocates for creation-oriented ‘tech’ rather than using technology as a template. ‘AIGC is a very narrow field, essentially content consumption. Tech is more about improving lives.’

This perspective reveals that Xiaohongshu, having reaped AI's rewards, knows its boundaries.

As an AI ‘connector,’ Xiaohongshu doesn’t see itself as providing Y Combinator-style startup support like Chanji Venture.

Xiaohongshu previously surveyed many AI innovators to understand what support they wanted from the community. The top answer was ‘influence.’ Influence begins with precisely gaining ‘attention’ from the right audience. The more attention a product receives, the faster it can achieve product-market fit (PMF). On a broader level, products can reach investors, major companies, and other resources; more practically, they can directly acquire seed users and achieve commercialization.

The hackathon continues this philosophy: the Xiaohongshu community can support all things AI, and now it hopes to use the hackathon's ‘Build in Public’ approach to help these ‘tech creators’ quickly achieve PMF.

If ‘Build in Public’ helps entrepreneurs focus on low-cost, efficient PMF completion, then the hackathon marks Xiaohongshu's first step into AI production resources—a key move in becoming a ‘connector.’