The Last Social Network

While killing time recently, I was scrolling through my phone and learned that a childhood friend had gone out for pizza. Two guys from my high school are now roommates (nice to see they are still in touch!). And a friend of my brother’s had gotten tickets for a Cubs game.

I saw all of this on Venmo. The popular payment app is primarily a way for people to send one another money, maybe with an informative or amusing description. But it has also long had a peculiar social feature. Unless you opt out, every Venmo profile is visible to the public, and every transaction shows up in a feed visible to your friends. Venmo’s feed is hardly social media at its most riveting. Do I really want to know that a camp friend is settling up her dinner bill? Some posts are simply indecipherable; a transaction marked “stuff” could be anything. Yet I occasionally open the app to pay someone and then end up on my feed, strangely engrossed by the tidbits of information about whom people are paying, and for what.

On Venmo, you won’t see influencers pushing affiliate links. Scrolling the app feels like a throwback to a lost era of social media, to a time when people used their feeds to connect with friends and share updates on what they were doing. That used to happen on Facebook, but the site is now more of a place for “Shrimp Jesus” than genuine social networking. TikTok, and to a lesser degree Instagram, are mainly platforms to watch short videos posted by strangers. And Twitter is now, well, X. Somehow, Venmo—Venmo!—lives on as one of the last real social networks.

The Venmo feed enables the voyeuristic thrill of looking at something you feel you shouldn’t. So much of what’s shared on there is incidental; stumbling upon something revelatory can be a delight. People may not be consciously posting for a public audience at all, which results in updates that can be unintentionally charming, or fodder for gossip. Does a friend paying an ex for sushi suggest that they went on a date? Does a bunch of people sending taco emoji mean your friends hung out without you? That you can like and comment on other people’s transactions also introduces a touch of chaos to a feed. The dark side is that Venmo’s freewheeling posts have led people to accidentally divulge sensitive personal info.

Venmo feels like a classic social network in part because the people on your friends list may not just be your nearest and dearest. The app lets people link their profile with their phone contacts. Because the app has been popular for a decade, many people may have opened their accounts at a time when they were less cautious about oversharing. That’s certainly true for me. I don’t remember syncing my Facebook account with Venmo, yet in 2024, I still see Venmo updates from high-school classmates I barely remember. It’s weird, but fun, to get a detailed view into an acquaintance’s day through such a social-media post. Two girls from my summer-camp cabin still appear to hang out frequently; I wish them all the best.

Venmo has changed, along with the rest of social media. Users’ posts were once shared by default on a global public feed that allowed people to scroll through what strangers in Oakland or Omaha were up to. In 2021, the company shut down the global feed, restricting what users could see in their feed to their more immediate contacts. By doing this, Venmo ended up making the app feel more intimate—more like a bygone Facebook than Twitter. The friends feed also seems less inundated with posts than it once was. Many savvy Venmo users have added privacy settings to their transactions, Lana Swartz, a media-studies professor at the University of Virginia and the author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media, told me. A spokesperson for Venmo declined to share what percentage of its users have set their accounts to private.

Still, because Venmo is so big, with some 90 million active users, the feed remains a grab bag of posts chronicling people’s daily lives. And what people spend money on says a great deal about who they are. As Swartz put it, the app has been able to “make visible the often invisible social components of money.” Venmo is not a place with thirst traps, perfectly curated photos, and creators who have garnered massive followers. Stars who have a whole team coordinating their Instagram may still manage their own Venmo account. Ben Affleck reportedly dissed a detractor via his account a few years ago; fans have tried to pay Timothée Chalamet. Last month, Wired found J. D. Vance’s public Venmo account; Tucker Carlson and the government-relations director at the Heritage Foundation were among those on his friends list. Reporters (and internet sleuths) have previously surfaced the Venmo accounts of President Joe Biden, former Press Secretary Sean Spicer, Representative Matt Gaetz, and a top aide to Justice Clarence Thomas.

Of course, Venmo is a throwback to an earlier form of social networking only because users don’t tend to think about it as a social network at all. Surely lots of Venmo users never check their feed. But the platform incidentally reveals much about whom people actually know. It is easy to scroll Venmo—with its nuggets of gossip and banal updates—and feel a pang of nostalgia about the internet as it used to exist. The influencer era of the social web can feel a bit lonely. “As the feeds fade and viral videos take over, we are losing something important: a place to hang out online,” Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic. I can open TikTok and see a random influencer do the craziest prank I have ever witnessed, and I can open Facebook and see a torrent of clickbaity celebrity news from accounts I don’t follow. Venmo doesn’t have any rage-baiting or misinformation campaigns. Instead, I just learned that some people I know are attending a bachelorette party, and that a classmate’s dad appears to be paying her rent.

But for every accidentally telling reimbursement, Venmo is a stream of posts about paying the gas bill and settling a check after dinner. It is not an exciting place to hang out. Other social-media sites, misguided or not, moved away from a chronological feed of updates for a reason. The vision of social media as a place to post simple updates now seems quaint, if not naive. Venmo lives on as an endearing relic of this era. But it’s also a reminder that the old social web was never all that great.