Curtis Chapman had a problem with hatescrolling. The Toronto barber, 34, found himself stuck in an algorithmic loop watching right-wing influencers like Ben Shapiro and Andrew Tate spewing politically charged rhetoric on Instagram reels. Mesmerized by the videos, he would get in paragraph-long arguments in the comments section with other followers. “It made me feel like crap all the time,” Chapman says. 

In August 2023, Chapman reached a breaking point—his screen time had reached upwards of eight hours a day—so he permanently deleted his Instagram, Facebook and TikTok accounts, and vowed to spend his newfound free time on old hobbies like reading and skateboarding.

Not long after, Chapman started turning to shopping apps to fill the void. “I basically went from scrolling through Instagram to scrolling through eBay, Poshmark or Depop,” says Chapman, whose nostalgic love for vintage wrestling shirts began to take on an outsized importance in his life. He would spend at least seven hours a day perusing vintage clothing—only one hour less than during his peak social media addiction. “Seeing certain nostalgic items in front of me and knowing it was possible to buy them just fuelled it.”

Social media is in its flop era. Between articles proclaiming “the internet isn’t fun anymore,” that millennials have “aged out of the internet,” and predictions of the end of “TikTok’s infinite scroll,” many of the early netizens who populated and shaped the internet no longer have much use for it. Facebook has been a dinosaur platform for years, and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X, triggered a mass exodus of users and employees. Even some TikTok users are fleeing, escaping a barrage of negativity from strangers, perhaps in search of more in-person experiences.

And while the internet’s earliest adopters have become its most disillusioned, there remains one category that has continued to experience unprecedented growth since 2020: online resale apps. In May 2021, Poshmark, a no-frills app where people buy and sell used clothes, had 2.5 million users. As of October 2023, that number more than doubled to six million. Platforms like Depop, Poshmark, Mercari, Vinted, Grailed, The RealReal and Ntwrk continue to benefit from the innate human desire to buy stuff without leaving the house, to the extent that ThredUp, a fashion marketplace, predicts the global secondhand apparel market will be worth US$350 billion by 2028. As more retailers experiment with building communities, hosting live shopping experiences or connecting users in their marketplaces through comment boards—is it possible that we’ve replaced social media with just…buying stuff?

One of social media’s initial promises was its ability to open up social circles so people could connect with anyone, anywhere, who shared their interests. “Now we’re seeing a shift where people are craving smaller-scale interactions,” says Sohyeon Hwang, a PhD candidate who studies online communities at Northwestern University.

There are few interactions at a smaller scale than a direct buying-and-selling transaction between two people. And many online resale groups, particularly local ones, have created vibrant communities for members. Chapman says that by conversing with people who shared his interests on Facebook Marketplace and Depop, he forged unexpected friendships with vintage sellers who now save items he’ll appreciate and offer special discounts. 

The time he spends surfing online resale platforms is less toxic than social media, he says. “After all, the items that I’m purchasing aren’t judging me.”

Social commerce, which involves leveraging existing connections on social platforms for the purpose of buying stuff, is emerging as a key part of how consumers interact with brands. McKinsey has hailed it as “a paradigm shift in how consumers interact with brands,” while consulting firm Accenture predicted in a separate report that the social commerce market will reach US$1.2 trillion by 2025. 

Instagram announced shopping capabilities in 2019, and TikTok caught up in 2023. Now even YouTube is getting in on the action, collaborating with Shopify to allow creators to tag products. According to YouTube, users watched 30 billion hours of shopping-related content in 2023. At the moment, social commerce primarily involves adding shopping capabilities to existing social media platforms. But if people are increasingly abandoning social media in favour of shopping, could online resale apps hook more users by communifying their spaces?

Poshmark, for example, has bet on live shopping as a way to bring users together and keep them on the app. “On the consumer side, what you get [from watching live shows] is that deep connection. It’s not just from the viewer to the host, it’s for everyone else who is also watching. The chat is going through the roof. They’re there for camaraderie and for entertainment,” says Tracy Sun, founder of Poshmark, in an interview with The Logic. 

“That ability to speak to people and respond in real time lends a community feel to shopping.”

If online resale apps added more features allowing users to connect directly to one another, it might inspire users to spend more time on the app. “On a lot of platforms, the ways that communities kind of start to form is when people have quite a bit of wiggle room to change the experience of the community,” says Hwang. 

While online shopping offers an opportunity to connect with like-minded individuals, whether it has the potential to foster meaningful connections remains to be seen. Michael D’Abramo, managing director at marketing consulting firm Sklar Wilton & Associates, says it’s possible, to a small degree. “You’re not going to get a mass community, but you might see some niche communities forming.” 

Kevin Ackermann, a researcher at Northwestern University, agrees. “There are so many different internets,” he says. “I think it’s less ‘if you build it, they will come,’ now it’s ‘if you build it, some may come.’” 

This all rests on one fundamental question: can genuine community be built on the foundation of commerce? One app is trying in earnest. Lucky Sweater, built by Uber alumna Carley Lake, is a slow fashion trading platform inspired by the vibrant communities she saw on Instagram resale pages like Sell Trade Slow Fashion. 

“There’s a lot of magic in these spaces that are built around things,” she says. “It’s not just commerce. There’s connections happening. You start to learn about people: ‘Who had it before me?’ I realized Instagram isn’t built for this, Reddit isn’t built for this.” 

Lucky Sweater doesn’t just offer a trading marketplace. Users have a full social profile where they can post pictures of their outfits and participate in discussion boards. The company is also relying on community input to help shape their business model, putting out surveys with a list of the most sustainable and user-friendly ways the app can make money. 

“What I hope [with Lucky Sweater] is we realize that consumption does not equal happiness. That high goes away instantly, but what does make us happy is community and these relationships,” Lake says. 

For Chapman, his moment of reckoning came after ordering a $600 WWF (now WWE) replica title belt from the ’90s. He says his wife freaked out, and after coming to terms with the fact he wasn’t making great financial decisions, he deleted the shopping apps from his phone too. 

Now without either vice, he’s broken free of his addiction and feels less tethered to his phone. Instead, Chapman says, he’s spending more quality time with his son and is a regular at the gym.