Why'd You Push That Button?

Why do you stalk people on Venmo?This week on Why’d You Push That Button, we’re getting into one of the real soap operas of modern life: Venmo’s public activity feed. Some people never look at it; some people scroll through it during their daily commute, inexplicably curious about why their friends are exchanging money. The payment app launched in 2009 and is now popular enough to work as a verb: “I’ll Venmo you,” meaning “I’ll hit you back right now and accompany the payment with some emoji or a dumb inside joke.” Yet, somehow, despite its popularity, and despite numeroustrend pieces pointing out the potential for purchase-history sleuthing, users still make their transactions public, allowing others to mine them for drama. Why do we do this to ourselves, (if you even do it) and what secrets can we uncover? Will there ever come a day when a Venmo transaction description is as carefully considered as an Instagram caption? Will you ever hear the end of it, RE: that mysterious 2AM Uber charge? As you may have guessed, it’s about to get pretty messy! First we talked to Olivia de Recat, a cartoonist who “decoded” some common Venmo charges in the New Yorker earlier this fall, and uses the app’s public feed to imagine what ex-love interests might be up to. It’s a crucial resource, she says, when an ex isn’t active on other social media — a winking emoji and a beer mug say a lot more than silence, even if they don’t say much. Then we called up Ashley’s college friend Michelle, who had a slightly less whimsical story about some deeply unpleasant information she managed to dig up via Venmo. You might want to cover your eyes, mouth, and ears while she is telling it. Finally, we took all of our anecdotes and questions to Venmo product lead Melanie Aliperti, to hear a little bit more about why a payments app has a social feed at all, whether this payment app is in fact a social media app, and how stories about Venmo-enabled drama might affect design decisions in the future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

29min

Why do you hold on to text threads?This week on Why’d You Push That Button, we’ve been hypnotized by the romance of New York in December and we’re acting accordingly! Twinkle lights, snow banks, and love letters. I recommend listening with a cup of hot chocolate or a bucket of that popcorn that has the little paper dividers between the three flavors. Get cozy; hold hands. The big question: how do you decide to delete or save text threads from friends, family, or significant others? If you have 3GB of texts from an ex, you’re never actually going to scroll back to the beginning, so why can it feel so hard to let go? If you have absolutely no old texts on your phone, what is wrong with you, just wondering? This episode was inspired by Maureen O’Connor’s 2013 New York Magazine essay “All My Exes Live in Texts,” which I am obsessed with, and in which she argues that we struggle to let go of old relationships' digital artifacts because they represent “a dozen soap operas playing at the same time on a dozen different screens, and you are the star of them all.” Wow! A little cynical, but at least 100 percent true if you’re being honest with yourself. To get some alternative angles on this topic, we spoke to freelance writer and former Racked shopping and style editor Nicola Fumo, who has a complicated system for saving and curating the messages she cares about. (This system was inspired by the one, the onlyKim Kardashian West.) Then we called up my college boyfriend Sean, and the two of us had a weird little moment that was ultimately fine. He also explained how deleting texts makes for stilted friendships and missed plans. Finally, we took all of our questions to Michelle Janning, a professor of sociology at Whitman College who’s dedicated her career to studying the differences between digital and physical communication, with a particular focus on how we decide what to save, how to save it, and when to look back at it. Her book, Love Letters: Saving Romance in the Digital Age,will be out sometime in 2018. She had so much wisdom to share and we couldn’t believe she was real. (sent via text by Kaitlyn Tiffany) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

36min

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