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

28 points by pcarleton 11y ago

khgvljhkb 11y ago
Bitcoin could do this 2007...
cassieramen 11y ago
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/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/4-follow-the-money/
- dkroy 11y ago
  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.
  - j_s 11y ago
    I've not used Venmo... what is the default setting?
    - dkroy 11y ago
      It looks like the default setting is public.
    - dionidium 11y ago
      Public is the default. You can change it: https://help.venmo.com/customer/portal/articles/1322627-how-do-i-keep-my-payment-activity-private- https://help.venmo.com/customer/portal/articles/1322627-how-...
- rmac 11y ago
  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
  - pcarleton 11y ago
    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).
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
dkroy 11y ago
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?
- pcarleton 11y ago
  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/ https://haskellonheroku.com/) and halcyon.sh. I don't know if I could have figured out deploying to heroku without it.
prezjordan 11y ago
This seems to be crashing my browser :( Breaking chrome inspector, too.
bramm 11y ago
Happy to report that it only showed me, since I already had my privacy settings adjusted. Whew!

28 points by pcarleton 11y ago

Bitcoin could do this 2007...

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/ https://gimletmedia.com/episode/4-follow-the-money/

dkroy 11y ago
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.
- j_s 11y ago
  I've not used Venmo... what is the default setting?
  - dkroy 11y ago
    It looks like the default setting is public.
  - dionidium 11y ago
    Public is the default. You can change it: https://help.venmo.com/customer/portal/articles/1322627-how-do-i-keep-my-payment-activity-private- https://help.venmo.com/customer/portal/articles/1322627-how-...
rmac 11y ago
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
- pcarleton 11y ago
  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).
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]

dkroy 11y ago

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?

pcarleton 11y ago
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/ https://haskellonheroku.com/) and halcyon.sh. I don't know if I could have figured out deploying to heroku without it.

prezjordan 11y ago

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

bramm 11y ago

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