3 ms·

Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that makes them use it, and more because of the analysis,

Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that makes them use it, and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that.

dkga 8mo ago
Yes, all of which can be purely personal and not shared beyond the device.
- alexfoo 8mo ago
  Sure, but many people want to use Strava for more than one purpose. a) Analysis and tracking of your own personal goals. (Some of the tools are better than the stuff available on the device itself.) b) Sharing and socialising some other activities. You can be careful and only allow certain activities to be public but you'll make mistakes and eventually many people will just think "whatever, I'll just default to public and remember to hide the ones I don't want to be public" and then it's even easier to make mistakes. Defaulting to "opt-in" is all well and good until a human makes a mistake.
  - roywiggins 8mo ago
    imho with unusually sensitive things like precise location data it could just not let you opt-in to making it all public, and make it much easier to share with a specific named friends than to share on a public directory
    - nradov 8mo ago
      I really don't understand these criticisms of Strava, it has excellent privacy controls so you can share as little or as much as you want. You can already choose to share your activities with only your friends (followers). Or keep your activities private or hide the location data.
      - iamacyborg 8mo ago
        Strava has had a lot of privacy issues over the years, particularly with stuff like flybys.
      - alexfoo 8mo ago
        It does but my point is that your settings are applied to all activities. Here's a few examples that might help demonstrate my point: I used to do parkrun regularly. I had no problem sharing my Strava activities for parkrun because me doing it wasn't a secret, nor was the location secret, nor was my time secret. All of these things could be found from the parkrun website once the results had come up. John Doe was at this location at 9am and ran this route with 400 others in a time of 26 minutes or whatever. I was also part of a cycling club that did a regular "club run" on a Sunday. 5-15 of us all doing the same route. It was good for club morale for us all to upload our rides to help show how popular it was and encourage other club members to come along. They could see that we weren't going at a silly pace and that we stopped regularly to regroup as we had riders of all abilities and speeds riding with us. But then I also helped out with my kids running club at school, taking a bunch of 7-11 year old's on a 20 minute jog/run (depending on how quick they were) around the local area. This absolutely should not appear on Strava (public or not). The running club wasn't a secret (everyone at the school knew since they had the option of letting their kid do it) but that's a whole world of difference from having it public on Strava showing the usual start time, the various routes we used to take, where we stopped, etc. Privacy zones can help hide the start/end but that wouldn't help hide everything. We just made sure that all of the parents who helped out knew that we shouldn't even record it with their smartwatch. I just used to create a manual entry of "Morning run" with approximate distance and time. That was good enough for my training stats. There's no one privacy setting that handles all of this. Whatever setting you use relies on me to manually adjust the activities that don't fit that setting. The problem is that humans are fallible, so remembering to make it private or hide the location data isn't entirely reliable. You're also at the mercy of Strava (or whatever) not doing something stupid and accidentally making private data visible due to some bug, glitch or leak.
        roywiggins 8mo ago
        Right, requiring human intervention to share a run (other than maybe with eg a specific small circle of mutual friends) seems like it solves all those problems, other than perhaps being annoyed that you forgot to manually share a run. But at least that's a failure you can fix once you notice, as opposed to making something public that shouldn't have been. Letting people opt in to automatically sharing runs to the public just seems like something designed to get people to share stuff without thinking about it.
ebergen 8mo ago
For me it's both. I compare my runs on routes and segments going back years. The social part is nice to share info about trail conditions and see when my friends hit a big effort or PR.
iamacyborg 8mo ago
> and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that Which is weird, because if they bought a Garmin device, they already have all that built in.
- embedding-shape 8mo ago
  Which if you've ever had a Garmin device + tried Strava, you'd realize that perhaps Strava provides additional insights on top of what Garmin provides?
  - iamacyborg 8mo ago
    Genuinely not sure what insights they provide that you don’t get out of the box from Garmin. The social stuff is nice though.
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      > Genuinely not sure what insights they provide that you don’t get out of the box from Garmin. Genuinely weird to make statements like "they already have all that built in" if you don't even know what Strava provides, don't you think?
      - iamacyborg 8mo ago
        I’ve been using both for ~7 years so I’m pretty familiar with them…

Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that makes them use it, and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that.

dkga 8mo ago

Yes, all of which can be purely personal and not shared beyond the device.

alexfoo 8mo ago
Sure, but many people want to use Strava for more than one purpose. a) Analysis and tracking of your own personal goals. (Some of the tools are better than the stuff available on the device itself.) b) Sharing and socialising some other activities. You can be careful and only allow certain activities to be public but you'll make mistakes and eventually many people will just think "whatever, I'll just default to public and remember to hide the ones I don't want to be public" and then it's even easier to make mistakes. Defaulting to "opt-in" is all well and good until a human makes a mistake.
- roywiggins 8mo ago
  imho with unusually sensitive things like precise location data it could just not let you opt-in to making it all public, and make it much easier to share with a specific named friends than to share on a public directory
  - nradov 8mo ago
    I really don't understand these criticisms of Strava, it has excellent privacy controls so you can share as little or as much as you want. You can already choose to share your activities with only your friends (followers). Or keep your activities private or hide the location data.
    - iamacyborg 8mo ago
      Strava has had a lot of privacy issues over the years, particularly with stuff like flybys.
    - alexfoo 8mo ago
      It does but my point is that your settings are applied to all activities. Here's a few examples that might help demonstrate my point: I used to do parkrun regularly. I had no problem sharing my Strava activities for parkrun because me doing it wasn't a secret, nor was the location secret, nor was my time secret. All of these things could be found from the parkrun website once the results had come up. John Doe was at this location at 9am and ran this route with 400 others in a time of 26 minutes or whatever. I was also part of a cycling club that did a regular "club run" on a Sunday. 5-15 of us all doing the same route. It was good for club morale for us all to upload our rides to help show how popular it was and encourage other club members to come along. They could see that we weren't going at a silly pace and that we stopped regularly to regroup as we had riders of all abilities and speeds riding with us. But then I also helped out with my kids running club at school, taking a bunch of 7-11 year old's on a 20 minute jog/run (depending on how quick they were) around the local area. This absolutely should not appear on Strava (public or not). The running club wasn't a secret (everyone at the school knew since they had the option of letting their kid do it) but that's a whole world of difference from having it public on Strava showing the usual start time, the various routes we used to take, where we stopped, etc. Privacy zones can help hide the start/end but that wouldn't help hide everything. We just made sure that all of the parents who helped out knew that we shouldn't even record it with their smartwatch. I just used to create a manual entry of "Morning run" with approximate distance and time. That was good enough for my training stats. There's no one privacy setting that handles all of this. Whatever setting you use relies on me to manually adjust the activities that don't fit that setting. The problem is that humans are fallible, so remembering to make it private or hide the location data isn't entirely reliable. You're also at the mercy of Strava (or whatever) not doing something stupid and accidentally making private data visible due to some bug, glitch or leak.
      - roywiggins 8mo ago
        Right, requiring human intervention to share a run (other than maybe with eg a specific small circle of mutual friends) seems like it solves all those problems, other than perhaps being annoyed that you forgot to manually share a run. But at least that's a failure you can fix once you notice, as opposed to making something public that shouldn't have been. Letting people opt in to automatically sharing runs to the public just seems like something designed to get people to share stuff without thinking about it.

ebergen 8mo ago

For me it's both. I compare my runs on routes and segments going back years. The social part is nice to share info about trail conditions and see when my friends hit a big effort or PR.

iamacyborg 8mo ago

> and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that Which is weird, because if they bought a Garmin device, they already have all that built in.

embedding-shape 8mo ago
Which if you've ever had a Garmin device + tried Strava, you'd realize that perhaps Strava provides additional insights on top of what Garmin provides?
- iamacyborg 8mo ago
  Genuinely not sure what insights they provide that you don’t get out of the box from Garmin. The social stuff is nice though.
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    > Genuinely not sure what insights they provide that you don’t get out of the box from Garmin. Genuinely weird to make statements like "they already have all that built in" if you don't even know what Strava provides, don't you think?
    - iamacyborg 8mo ago
      I’ve been using both for ~7 years so I’m pretty familiar with them…