1. No one asked for this. This is Paypal trying to make a payments app social and people staying for the payments app despite the social feed.
2. So long as you can change the defaults, no one cares about if the company has sane default settings etc. Millenials / Gen Z care about privacy and most of my friends default to private. A company's defaults is not reflective of the privacy concerns of users because they know they have the better product.
3. Venmo messages are often jokes and payment amounts aren't shown even when public/friends
https://qz.com/359903/the-emoji-of-venmo/
4. Square just didn't catch on and Venmo's integration with other apps makes it locked in (Splitwise and Tab to name two main ones. My friends refer to Venmo and those two as the payments holy trinity)
5. This article is crap and no one I know looks at the feed. If you're dumb enough to cheat and use a public Venmo payment, wow. When I hit it on the splash page I see payments from a few people, nothing more interesting than pizza, rent, or utilities. Incredible, I know people have basic functions! The privacy invasion!
6. Most people I know transfer to their bank immediately. The intermediary step is a pain but far less than using any other payment service. I'll get over not earning my .03% interest at my bank and letting Venmo skim the interest on their end to keep the service free. Yes customer service is crap and so is Paypal generally but the reality is that it removes far more pain in life than it creates.