Why TikTok, Instagram, and the web are turning into shopping malls

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.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we talk to Mia about her adventures in Flip. (Spoiler alert: she’s not quitting her day job, at least not yet.) Then we chat about the Fujifilm X100VI, the successor to TikTok’s favorite camera, and what’s so special about the X100 line in general — and why nobody’s done a good job of copying it. Finally, we answer a question from The Vergecast hotline (1-866-VERGE11) about our recent coverage of parts pairing and the right-to-repair movement.

If you want to learn more about everything we discussed in this episode, here are a few links to get you started, starting with Flip:

And on the Fujifilm X100VI: