There’s no hidden malice here, the counter was genuinely getting more and more broken over time!
To provide some context, the page was really quickly written when we were first launching the current accounts and it wasn’t designed to scale too well, especially above half a million. Many of you noticed in the early days that the number would fluctuate overnight as it recalculated and corrected itself. It was never originally built to stay for anywhere near this long.
While we’re cleaning up resources and internal services ahead of the closure of the prepaid cards, this counter was one of the things we unfortunately had to remove and the engineering time wasn’t immediately available to replace it.
All that being said, do let @tristan and @cookywook know what kind of data you would like to see!
Struggling how seeing a counter with the number of CA holders in any way adds to transparency. Fun thing to know but adds nothing to the way Monzo operates.
People will complain over anything
But really, being able to see it going up, and occasional visualisations like the one in the 500,000 blog post are extremely satisfying to see. It increases the feeling of being part of something larger than yourself.
It gives you a simple sense of how well they are doing, even if that is very oversimplified.
Seeing the number of current accounts is super interesting but it doesn’t mean much if they aren’t active! While I know showing active accounts probably isn’t a great idea, information such as the number of transactions in a day or the number of pots that have been created could be a cool data to share!
Only if the “I’m user #x on Monzo” tweets get bought back & I’m guessing they won’t be or we pester users here a lot but we’d probably end up with less data.
How’s it broken? Is the figure generated not correct anymore? I would have thought if it hit 500k and then Monzo announced 500k the next day then it seems to be working very well. If it causes some sort of strain on resources then is it possible to update once a day at least?
I find the current account counter to be the most useful data that I can think of having. It tells me how fast Monzo is issuing accounts in almost real time and I use the data to plug in to my own sheet to track the value of the company using my own formula. There are also some great visualisations that people have built using the data feed so it would be quite a shame to see them lose their feed and their work go to waste.
Things like viewing where in the world transactions are taking place would be a cool gimmick but it wouldn’t be useful information like the current account counter.
The issue with the counter is that it shows how many current accounts have been signed up, not how many are still open or how many are active. As such it’s not a particularly useful data point.
This does however demonstrate one of the big problems of software development, that it’s literally often not worth your while to give users a temporary or experimental feature because of the fuss that is raised when you decide to not support it any more
For me personally I’m complaining because I’ve noticed lots of little hints towards Monzo clamming up more and more - moving away from the ideal I felt it was striving from before. Examples of these are
@BethS ceasing to post prepaid accounts not-upgraded with a reason like “couldn’t find the info anymore”
@cookywook posting that these figures will be posted about after the prepaid program is closes up when Monzo write it all up
@cookywook posting that current account counter will be going away with a reason like “its not useful and its technically hacky”
Those are the ones that come to mind in the context of this topic but I feel in my gut like I’ve been noticing little things like this for a while now. On the surface alone none of those things would really bother me but together they are starting to seem a little too much like a concerted effort to remove information that was previously available freely to the public
I may just be reading too much into it, I wouldn’t want to just assume the best and not voice my concerns. I like Monzo, I love its culture but that doesn’t mean it can do no wrong. I care about its culture far more than the services it offers personally - if I just let go of the culture IMO I can get a better product from Starling right now (and I am using both Monzo and Starling because they are the best I’ve found right now overall)
Sorry you feel that way, Peter! I promise we’re still absolutely committed to transparency, and I’ll personally always fight for sharing more, rather than less.
We still adhere to our blog post from last year: Transparent By Default. This line in particular sums it up:
An argument must be made to keep something secret, rather than to make it open
I think in this case we probably haven’t communicated our reasons for removing that counter very clearly, and that’s my bad. Rika’s done a much better job than I of explaining it here:
Looker is not something I have time to look at. I had it open as a tab and then had to reset chrome because it was being stupid. I didn’t think about bookmarking it because it’s not relevant to my role. I have two things bookmarked on looker: my qa and my productivity.
I’m really sorry . I didn’t mean that you personally should have to further justify yourself. After all it’s pretty unfair of me to imply you could be lying about stuff ️
While I know showing active accounts probably isn’t a great idea, information such as the number of transactions in a day or the number of pots that have been created could be a cool data to share!
or we pester users here a lot but we’d probably end up with less data.
I wouldn’t want to just assume the best and not voice my concerns. I like Monzo, I love its culture but that doesn’t mean it can do no wrong. I care about its culture far more than the services it offers personally - if I just let go of the culture IMO I can get a better product from Starling right now (and I am using both Monzo and Starling because they are the best I’ve found right now overall)
. I didn’t mean that you personally should have to further justify yourself. After all it’s pretty unfair of me to imply you could be lying about stuff