Examining the evolution of mobile social payments in Venmo

This study aims to understand the changes in behavior over time of users on Venmo, an American social payments platform. As there is a dearth of replication studies in social media studies, we chose to replicate an existing study of Venmo using new data we collected. This enabled us to track the growth of Venmo from the beginning of the platform, and to verify the robustness of the existing, very limited literature using Venmo data. To accomplish this, we studied how the structure of the transaction graph of Venmo transactions changed since 2016, the data endpoint of previous research. Additionally, we collected a much larger set of data and examined if new community structures or network-level features emerged since 2016. Although we found that Venmo's growth has maintained a similar pattern within its transaction graph and community structure, we discovered some changes, such as the existence of more communities of a smaller size and an increase towards users quitting the platform after one transaction versus becoming regular users. Ultimately, our study confirms both the methods and results of previous work on Venmo, opening up the possibility for future work to study if changes unfold in the next era of the platform. We argue that this replication study serves as an intervention in the field of social media research more broadly, and encourage others to take up replication studies to enhance the reliability and generalized knowledge of the field.