Tales of a shopping influencer
Image: Alex Parkin / The Verge
Everywhere you go on the internet, it feels like someone’s trying to sell you something. TikTok is being overrun by sales pitches for stuff on the TikTok Shop; Instagram is making it easier to buy everything you see in a post; platforms from Pinterest to Prime Video are adding ever more ads, ever more hungrily trying to get you to buy something.
The new app Flip, in a sense, is just saying the quiet part out loud: it’s a social media platform that is absolutely, unequivocally, unabashedly about shopping all the way down. The Verge’s Mia Sato recently threw herself into the Flip ecosystem to figure out what life is like as a shopping influencer and what it says about the future of the internet that Flip even exists in the first place.
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