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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, I think most people use it to pay friends back for brunch or drinks. It's not like you're streaming all your credit card purchases. It's kinda like checking in on Foursquare with friends... it's a public way to expose your social graph a bit.

It may not be for you, but people love social media. To put it a different way: it's so successful because, despite there being lots of ways to pay back friends, none of the other ones let you subtly brag that you're out having fun.

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>it's so successful because, despite there being lots of ways to pay back friends

It was far and away the simplest and easiest way to quickly transfer money electronically, at least around ~6 years ago. The "big players" that have payment apps either weren't launched or were just getting started, and PayPal just had/has this bizarre level of BS required for a process that should just take like 2 or 3 simple steps.

Nowadays I have friends that occasionally put amusing messages and stuff in their payments, but I don't really get the feeling that people are actually showing off much. Most of the payments I see are between SOs or roommates splitting utilities+rent and such. There are probably plenty of people who do enjoy this part of the app, but Venmo just seems like a great product regardless, so I don't know how key it actually is.

I've been told Venmo works exactly like PayPal, which is to say it's a 2 step process to get money from your Venmo account into your actual checking/savings account. So that would make it just as usable as the, what, 20-year-old PayPal, and worse than Square Cash. Am I misinformed?

When I started using Venmo, PayPal was cumbersome to use (I don't even know if it had decent mobile app 6 years ago) and tended to have additional costs. Also the UI pummeled you with all sorts of random information and options, when all anyone wants to do is send $x to y-person as fast as counting cash in your wallet takes. For a group of people sitting in a restaurant, PayPal was (is? I dunno) annoying. Venmo is effortless.

I just looked up Square Cash, and it seems like it launched in 2015 according to Wikipedia. Everyone I know (who I would want to send money to/from) was already using Venmo by 2012, 2013 at the latest. I've yet to encounter a single instance where I wanted to switch, nor (anecdotally) have I heard someone voice a single complaint about Venmo in-person.

Venmo got to market with a pretty much pure product before anyone else, and has yet to give any cause for switching.

Wikipedia's article is very oddly worded, saying

"In March 2015, Square introduced Square Cash for businesses, which includes the ability for individuals, organizations, and business owners to use a unique username to send and receive money, known as a $cashtag"

But for some reason they neglect to point out the pre-for-business component. It actually dates back to 2013:

https://squareup.com/news/introducing-cashtags

I stand corrected, though, because as you note, Venmo predates it by several years. I guess I just had no reason to switch from PayPal until Square Cash came along in 2013 and was even more frictionless. But ultimately, these things are clearly down to network effect.

Oddly, all I can find about the PayPal mobile app is that it was "re-designed" in 2013. Of course, I was using PayPal on a Palm handheld back in ~2000....

The thing with PayPal is that it always seemed primarily targeted towards customer-business interactions. Trivial payments between friends didn't seem like a high-priority usecase back in ~2012. I noticed the same issues as you when I tried to Google its mobile history.

Venmo definitely won the first-to-market/network effect game. That said, I'm not complaining. Unless it looks like they are on course for bankruptcy or there is a major data leak, it's CX is pretty much exactly what I want it to be. The only unnecessary part is the social feed, but that has absolutely no impact on me unless I want it to (and sometimes it's amusing to see the messages my friends attach to them if I happen to look at it).

Could be. I used PayPal to transfer money to friends before it was even accepted on eBay, but obviously that's a pretty niche example.

It looks like Venmo is ~2x as popular as Square Cash from this recode article:

https://www.recode.net/2018/2/27/17059182/square-cash-app-mo...

And a few other good data points/comparisons.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/paypal-vs-google-wallet...

https://lifehacker.com/money-transfer-showdown-square-cash-v...

(One source points out that Square Cash followed Square Wallet and Square Order; I used Square Wallet because I also had their card-reader from back in the day, so this goes back to at least 2011).

> it's a public way to expose your social graph a bit.

Why is this a thing?

Bragging? "Look at me, I'm baller, spending money on my friends!"

so they can say it's public data and sell the ish out of it

> It may not be for you, but people love social media

People also love heroin and alcohol and tobacco. People love lots of things that are terrible for them.

People also love exercise, healthy food, and sleep.

I don't think payments is something that is social worthy, but comparing them to chemically-addicting substances is a little absurd.

That people like something doesn't mean it's good for them, or even makes them happy: anything that some people really like and that is undoubtedly harmful can serve to prove that point. It doesn't put social media and heroin "in the same ballpark", it doesn't even say social media is harmful, it just says the fact that some people like it isn't saying a lot in itself. (I might add, especially not when it comes in the form of "you don't love it but people love it".)

If you think letting your friends know you just had brunch is on par with heroin or alcohol... well, damn. I think social media can be unhealthy, and I think the pendulum is beginning to swing back the other way, but I support exploring new ways to communicate with the people around you.

Ugh.

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