A Tencent-backed, Reddit-Facebook hybrid is taking off in China

Jike (即刻), which means “immediately” in Chinese, is an ambitious startup that hopes to capitalize on a conspicuous gap in China’s social media sector – the lack of community.

Founded in Shanghai in 2015, the app soon caught fire among social media users. In its first two years, the company raised its series A and B rounds before closing a US$30 million series C from Tencent in February 2018. Another round worth tens of millions of dollars followed last July.

Image credit: Jike

For those familiar with Western consumer internet platforms, Jike is like a hybrid of Reddit and Facebook: Reddit in the way it groups users into communities, and Facebook in how it aims to bring people together and foster genuine connections online.

Jike groups users into social circles around interest-based topics or themes. The onboarding process asks users to join at least two out of 14 featured social circles, which include themes like humor, technology, lifestyle, music, movies, and photography.

The size of these social circles ranges from less than 50,000 users to 1 million and up. Tellingly, the theme with the largest social circles is “the two sexes,” which counts over a million users.

This focus on community is what sets Jike apart from popular social apps like WeChat, which is primarily a peer-to-peer communication platform. And while Weibo lets users share multimedia posts, check trending hashtags, follow publishers, brands, public figures, and news, it doesn’t place much emphasis on building mutual connections.

Yet Jike wasn’t always founded upon fostering community. Up until last year, the app was positioned as a content distribution platform with a simple subscribe-and-push model. Users would subscribe to themes of their choice and, after aggregating information from the internet, Jike would deliver relevant content to them.

Jike’s first notable pivot into social was in 2016, starting with the release of an in-app comment feature. By the end of that year, it had allowed users create their own social circles, which were previously operated entirely by the app’s editorial team.

By handing the reins of creation to users, Jike became a destination to follow where people can discuss new, unique, creative, interesting and fun topics, differentiating it from a crowd of other content distribution platforms.

Last year, the app again tried something new: featuring mostly professional content, Jike changed to prioritize user-generated content.

Across all of Jike’s feeds, articles and videos produced by media outlets began making way for text, images, and short videos created by ordinary users. In true form, Jike had become more of a platform driven by and for its communities.

Teasing China’s tech giants