> We decided, you should be able to share this stuff, because it’s interesting<p>Interesting, because this is main reason I don't like Venmo, and prefer PayPal, but everyone seems to want to use Venmo. In my social circle, many people have expressed similar sentiments.<p>I think the main thing they hit is being able to pay your Facebook friends by entering their name, before Facebook had Facebook Pay. Come to think of it, it would have been much wiser if Facebook acquired them instead of rolling out a competing payments system.
I still can't figure out for the life of me why anyone uses Venmo. I tried it once and had an awful experience. For those that use it, what is the appeal over simply using PayPal? That also lets you send money to friends for free. As far as I can tell, all the differences are very much in PayPal's favor:<p>1. Must use mobile app to send payments. You cannot send through the website. WTF?<p>2. When I tried to send $250, from my Venmo balance no less, I got an opaque error about please try again later. Only through trial and error did I figure out that it would let me send up to $100, but no more.<p>3. Everything about the social feed aspect. Among the Venmo users I know, no one actually uses it. Everyone talks about how easy it is to turn it off. But isn't this its only differentiator? If you're going to turn it off, why not just stick with PayPal which doesn't have this annoying anti-feature in the first place?<p>4. I could be wrong, but I think that even if you turn the feed off, you can't hide your list of "friends" from the public.
>We thought, “Why are we still doing this? We do everything else with our phones. We should definitely be using PayPal to pay each other back. But we don’t, and none of our friends do.”<p>None of my friends use any pay services. Apple pay, Venmo, Paypal, it's a crapshoot if I can find a way to pay them back. I was able to convince them to use Facebook Messenger pay because we were having a conversation in it once. We are in our 20s. I would be surprised if they had set up Apple/Google pay on their phone to pay contactless (maybe now with covid). My point is -- Venmo doesn't solve any problems it just creates another -- namely another payment system none of my peers use.
Off topic, but one major thing I found interesting moving from the U.S. to Europe was how the SEPA system here makes products like Venmo obsolete and how Venmo seems like just a bandaid on top of the archaic banking system there.
College Humor did an amazing take on the public feed "social networking" feature of Venmo.<p><a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BWFLztKBrLY" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BWFLztKBrLY</a>
I quit venmo when they went mobile only. There's no obvious way they make money, so it must be in the metadata they collect... somewhere. I can control what they see from a desktop web browser, but on mobile their app asks for far too much.
Discussed (a bit) at the time: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844404" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7844404</a>