RARE PHOTOS: Vinted hilarious unhinged finds pics | Rare Historical Photos

Remember when finding the perfect secondhand treasure actually required some legwork? If you wanted a pleated vintage skirt or had your heart set on a fabulous leopard-print coat, you might spend an afternoon making your way through thrift stores and hoping luck was on your side.

Then online marketplaces came along, and suddenly all that digging could be done from the sofa. With a few searches and some scrolling, the wardrobes of thousands of strangers were right there on your phone.

Vinted’s own story began with a wardrobe that needed clearing out. In 2008, Milda Mitkutė was moving apartments in Vilnius, Lithuania, and wanted a simple way to sell clothes she no longer wanted.

She brought the idea up to her friend Justas Janauskas at a party, although he initially doubted that many other people would have the same need. So they asked the guests around them. Their very informal market research changed his mind, and the two went on to create Vinted together.

The pair soon built the website, and they were in such a rush to get it up and running that they even forgot one pretty crucial detail: the “buy” button. Luckily, their friends noticed, Janauskas quickly fixed it, and Mitkutė went on to sell 40 of her own items in the first week.

From there, it was only a matter of time before the platform grew far beyond its Lithuanian beginnings. Today, Vinted has more than 105 million users around the world and operates in 27 countries.

Of course, put that many people in one digital marketplace and a little chaos is inevitable. Someone might list a cracked phone case for $1, while someone else spends days trying to knock 50 cents off the price of a T-shirt. Others recruit their cats as models, posing them next to whatever they’re hoping to sell.

Some buyers send unbelievably cheeky offers, and sellers occasionally fire back with replies that turn a tiny negotiation into a full-blown feud. The exchanges can get so ridiculous that you start wondering whether real people are actually typing them.

These kinds of interactions aren’t unique to Vinted. They can be explained by something called the “online disinhibition effect.”

In simple terms, people often feel less restrained online than they would face-to-face. On the app, the stranger you’re dealing with is often little more than a username and a profile picture.

Dr Bernie Hogan, an associate professor and senior research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, told Cosmopolitan that this can make it “harder to think of other people as people,” leaving us with less incentive to behave politely.

You also have to consider how used we’ve become to getting things almost instantly online. Psychologist Dr Tara Quinn-Cirillo told Cosmopolitan that this culture of immediacy can leave us with less patience. Add tiredness and the pressure of the cost-of-living crisis, and a lot of us are already stressed before we even open the app.

By the time someone logs onto Vinted after a hard day and starts negotiating over a pair of used trainers, they may have very little tolerance left for a slow reply or an offer they consider insulting.