An Ode to Venmo: Why It’s My Favorite Social Network

(Photo illustration by Daniel Bean)

About a year ago, a friend and I wanted to figure out whether mutual friends of ours were secretly dating. We had our suspicions, and we had been texting about it frequently, but we didn’t have any evidence.

Where could we turn? No one trusts Facebook enough to share personal information there; Twitter feels like more of a place to build a personal brand or share interesting links. Instagram, meanwhile, is more for pretty, but vague, snapshots, rather than photographs of canoodling couples.

No, none of those traditional social networks would bear any fruit. Forget the social media goliaths: We needed Venmo.

Prying eyes.

For the uninitiated, Venmo is a free app for Android and iOS whose main function is to let friends easily pay one another, whether when splitting the dinner bill or splitting the rent. A seemingly secondary part of the service is a social feed showing you the financial transactions between your contacts, which, if you connect the app to Facebook, is pretty much every acquaintance, friend, ex-lover, romantic interest, enemy, classmate, and co-worker you’ve had since college.

That Venmo social feed, it turned out, contained the smoking gun: a $15 charge with a caption that intimated that our mutual friends had gone to a movie together.

This was something we could work with. We could casually bring this transaction up in conversation the next time we hung out. And it was all because the two opted to share their monetary transactions on Venmo when they signed up.

Though it took us a few more months to confirm that they were, indeed, dating, Venmo was the big break in the case.

A mini-social network may seem like an ancillary function to a payments app, but the Venmo feed is chock-full of fascinating information. It displays the unfiltered economic activity of most every person you know. You can see who charged or paid whom and when, along with a short memo that Venmo requires you to write. These payments are usually centered around social events –– a Saturday night spent eating pizza with friends, a weekend trip, a concert — and therefore offer a window into the social lives of your contacts.

So you know that your two former co-workers hung out and had drinks Friday night because one of them paid the other and made an inside joke about the bar.

Venmo’s social feed is, at its core, a list of facts that tell you who was with whom in the past 24 hours — and a general idea of what they were doing. Because of this, Venmo has been my go-to source for friend gossip. It has also become my favorite social network, period. It’s fun to sit there in bed on a Sunday morning and see who was out drinking together the night before.

True, the captions that go along with transactions, which Venmo requires, are usually just inside jokes or emoji, but that’s the fun of it: They’re a mystery, a code I’m tasked to crack.

A payment post “Night Crawler” viewing.

I’m not the first one to have noticed this wonderful phenomenon. In April, The Atlantic’s Eric Levenson declared Venmo “one of the most interesting, informative social networks out there.” Just this week Bloomberg acknowledged that “part of the Venmo experience is the continuous scroll of your friends’ microeconomic activity as told through droll synopsis, inside jokes, and emoji.”

Indeed, Venmo has raised the bar for symbol-based storytelling in our social feeds. Asked to offer a memo in a payment, both my peers and I usually opt for an opaque series of emoji, to ward off prying eyes. This simple task, describing what I did last night with a few generic illustrations, started as a test of my emoji fluency and has slowly evolved into a splendid form of storytelling.

Crack the code.

Having a feed of facts related to monetary transactions, however vague, feels incredibly new and valuable. So much of social networking is painstakingly crafted and self-censored. It can be exhausting to parse through feed after feed of dull jokes, long-winded opinions, or carefully edited photos. Venmo, on the other hand, generates a list of monetary-related facts about your friends, arising from utility. 

It’s rare to find a feed as unedited as Venmo’s. This is both because of its utilitarian nature, and because competing social networks like Facebook have adopted algorithms to influence your feed, promoting or nixing posts based on the information they’ve gathered on you. Aside from the few people who make their payments private, my digital payment social network remains largely untouched. In an age when most companies are tinkering with a personalized display, I appreciate that a social network, no matter how limited, lets me do my own mental editing.

Then there’s chatting via payment. According to a friend, Venmo employees regularly send one another small sums of money like a penny or a dollar as a way of saying “good job,” or “cool shirt.” I’ve used Venmo the same way, sending money back and forth to have somewhat of a public conversation with a friend. It might not make much sense monetarily, but in a feed as noiseless and unedited as Venmo’s, it’s a novel form of communication — one that will get your friend’s attention.

After all, people tend to mute the overflow of notifications from email, Facebook, chat rooms, and Swarm. But usually people want to know when they’re getting paid. The Venmo payment hello is a text message with a tiny gift attached to it. It’s sort of like the sugarless lollipop a doctor used to give you at the end of an appointment: Not altogether useful, but it’s the thought that counts.

But ultimately the main draw of Venmo is that it’s inherently social. You can’t just post something by yourself. You have to interact with another person first. And since that interaction always involves a monetary give and take, there’s a higher bar than on most social networks. And also: Who doesn’t like getting money? If no one else notices your transaction, you can be sure that, at the very least, the person you paid will like it. That’s significant, considering the millions of YouTube videos, Spotify songs, Facebook posts, and tweets that fly over our heads every day, unloved.

You could say that’s the Venmo Feed Guarantee: You won’t ever be ignored. And in a day and age when it’s so easy to go unnoticed on the Internet, there’s something very gratifying and personal about that. 

Follow Alyssa Bereznak on Twitter or email her here.