Show HN: Six Degrees of Venmo – Visualizing your payment network | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Six Degrees of Venmo – Visualizing your payment network

venweb.heroku.com

28 pointspcarleton12 comments

I am very confused as to what the value proposition for venmo's social feature is. It's super creepy that by default someone can know all this information about me.

This just leads to creepy podcast fodder: https://gimletmedia.com/episode/4-follow-the-money/

You can have a private, public among friends or completely public transaction if you choose. The ones you can see in this are only the ones that the person who initiated the transaction has choose to share publicly with the world.

I've not used Venmo... what is the default setting?

It looks like the default setting is public.

Public is the default. You can change it:

https://help.venmo.com/customer/portal/articles/1322627-how-...

Using the venmo api you can get an entire friends list of any user, all you need is their ID.

I was hoping this demo would have crawled all of venmo but it looks like it is querying the api in real time. Mine only got to 3 degrees

It automatically stops at 3 in the interests of not exploding your computer (I found that expanding all the way to 6 would cause my laptop's fan to kick on as it moved hundreds of nodes around). You can keep expanding by clicking the button in the top left. (Click cancel if it's stuck).

This is some really nice eye candy. I saw that you did your web scraper in haskell even though you seem to be quite the polygot. What guided that decision?

Thanks! Haskell's had a special place in my heart for a few years, but I only ever used it in toy contexts (stuff like project euler). I wanted to do something a little more practical with it to see how it held up.

Big thanks to Miëtek Bak for his work on Haskell on Heroku (https://haskellonheroku.com/) and halcyon.sh. I don't know if I could have figured out deploying to heroku without it.

Happy to report that it only showed me, since I already had my privacy settings adjusted. Whew!

This seems to be crashing my browser :( Breaking chrome inspector, too.

Bitcoin could do this 2007...

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