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It was designed for Venmo to prove to new users that the app has a large network and was trustworthy > Yeah, absolutely, so one of the biggest purposes of the
by mediumdeviation 8y ago
It was designed for Venmo to prove to new users that the app has a large network and was trustworthy
> Yeah, absolutely, so one of the biggest purposes of the social feed when Venmo first launched was around this concept of social proof. So if you think about a product like Venmo, it’s really only useful to you if people that you want to transact with are also using Venmo. So when Venmo launched, we had two feeds, we had the public feed and the friend feed. And immediately when a new user signed up for Venmo, you could see in the public feed that Venmo was something other people were using.
From a Venmo product lead - https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/14/16643192/venmo-stalking-whyd-you-push-that-button-podcast https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/14/16643192/venmo-stalking-...
- wool_gather 8y agoGood find, thanks for sharing that. So it's classic case of the business deciding they had a use case that took precedence over their users' interests. I feel pretty confident that they could have come up with a better solution if they had considered the privacy aspect at all. One really simple, basic step might be not exposing the exact datetime when the transaction was made. Not linking both parties to the transaction in one display would be another choice that would still serve the purpose of demonstrating volume.