Why RedNote blocks teachers who did nothing wrong

You post nice content, you reply politely, and one morning the account is gone. “But I did nothing wrong.” You’re probably right, in the sense that you didn’t break any rule you could find written down. The trouble is that RedNote doesn’t only judge what you write. It also watches how you behave.

What RedNote is actually for

RedNote (Xiaohongshu) is where people in China go to read real reviews and compare things before they buy, a bit like Instagram, and more than 300 million people a month also use it as a search engine. Like any platform, it wants people to stay inside the app: look, compare, choose and buy right there.

Nobody outside RedNote knows the algorithm

We don’t know exactly what gets an account blocked, and neither does anyone else outside the company. The algorithm is hidden, so all any of us can do is guess from our own accounts and from what happened to teachers we know. One thing keeps coming up in all of those stories, though, and it’s abnormal activity.

Abnormal is anything a regular user wouldn’t do: posting nonstop, replying to ten posts in ten minutes, opening the app again and again all day, liking dozens of posts in a row, writing to every client under every post whether they’re your audience or not. To a person it looks like hard work. To the algorithm it looks exactly like a spam bot, and it gets blocked like one.

So if you’re sure you did nothing wrong, try counting: how many times you opened the app yesterday, how many posts you liked, how many comments you left. The answer might be sitting right there.

Then there are the words. When we started, the algorithm was pretty much blind to direct selling: you could mention lessons and classes, and nobody came after you for it. At some point we noticed it had changed, and now even the smallest, least obvious mention of classes or lessons can set the system off. There are ways to work around it, and we put them in the guide.

The platform’s logic, and ours

RedNote doesn’t want you to leave it, and it especially doesn’t want you taking its users somewhere else. Moving a client from RedNote to WeChat is still the only strategy that works, though. So you learn to stay invisible to the algorithm while you do it.

And you keep one more thing in mind from the very first day: it’s a Chinese service, and it can close your access for good, with nothing you can do about it. Even registering is hard without a reliable WeChat or a Chinese phone number, as we wrote in Your RedNote account got blocked. What now? So start with that mindset: if this account gets blocked, I won’t get it back, and I’ll start again.

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Clients are still there

None of this means RedNote is closed to teachers. Clients still go there every day looking for an English teacher, and there are still plenty of them. What’s changed is that you now need to understand how RedNote works, play by its rules and keep the algorithm’s attention off you.

There’s no universal strategy for that, and everyone ends up with their own. There is one general rule we stick to ourselves and give to every teacher, though: don’t sell directly on RedNote.