i have ‘soft’ left strava.
i upload files manually, they are all private, nothing is public.
i use for rides inspiration…to see the heatmaps and sometimes steal someone else ride adapt and do it on my own privately.
i have also added sauce which tell me how many donuts i have burnt…
in the past three years I haven’t been riding much, because we had our first kid and now our second. I haven’t been active on strava much, most rides were left private and I didn’t take part in group rides or gave kudos to friends or commented on their activities.
Not because I don’t care about them or their activities, but because I didn’t really had the desire to see how much or where others rode, when I couldn’t. So it’s not coming from a “I don’t care about you or what you do”-thing but more of a “I’m jealous of the riding you do right now, because I can’t”-thing.
Now, if I return to a more active training and riding schedule once the boys are a bit older and I found out that I got deleted from friends follower lists because I wasn’t stroking their ego to their desire I’d be a bit taken aback tbh.
If you actively seek out people who don’t engage with your posts and unfollow them it’s probably the right time to evaluate why you use the app in the first place.
I use Strava as a data sync but also to encourage others to train. Kind of an ifIcandoitsocanyou type thing.
I suppose it also stores my training pics too as my apple storage has been maxed out for years.
If Strava changes the hand gesture I’d go back. Imagine how much fun it would be just to give the finger to a few people. Someone stole your 50900th time up Pike Butte. Cool, I got something for you.
Imagine someone that joins you at your table in a pub. They never join in the conversation. They never buy a round. In fact they never have a drink. They just keep appearing whenever you are in the pub. That’s what these followers who never do anything are like. They are just silent stalkers. Who wants that?
Who wants random people you don’t even know following you just for some Kudos? Its so weird to me!
Oh they aren’t even random. People you know but they just don’t engage on the platform. Similar would be someone who sends a friend request in FB, you know them, but when you look at their feed there’s nothing, and they don’t comment or like anything, they just lurk without engagement.
Or they’ve been cloned/hacked ! I don’t know if it happens in Strava but certainly in Farceboke.
Maybe but for a long time I’ve no longer accepted those requests on Strava. I was only briefly on FB and just thought, what a load of hrsesht. Soon enough Strava will be gone.
As one who never got the social media thing I envision: people will be cloning their persona with some AI chat bot. It will post fake activities and pictures. It will reply to others posts. Do all the likes for them. Bots talking to bots. As soon as enough people do this, maybe real people might actually interact in person.
I def do this. I don’t follow people that don’t ride.
I can’t understand folk doing that, for me it brings a smile to my face, ‘Johnny … is riding again’. In my mind its a good thing they are missing out on 
Twitter and FB are cancer, along with TikTok, in my opinion. But that’s a whole other topic.
Couldn’t agree more. And it’s become an addiction like any other. It did take a little kick for me to just nuke my social media accounts but it’s honestly been so amazing for my mental health. I never used FB or Twitter thankfully. Strava is now just a data storage (now just a backup as Garmin is my primary). I have 0 followers and following 0. I kept Instagram for now as a photo dump for family. If anybody has a suggestion on how to share photos with friends and family in a safe and easy way I’d love to get off Instagram. Right now it just serves as a place to upload my race and event photos along so my family can see them.
I’m with you - having some level of requirement (give kudos often enough?) to be a part of the club seems very silly and self-centered.
On the topic of Kudos - I use kudos or comments when I feel like they’re especially warranted. I could care less if someone gives me kudos on a recovery ride or easy spin, but if I have a great race or a breakthrough workout, that feels good. If I give you kudos and “nice ride!” on every one of your rides…is that really valuable?
I also use Strava more to know what others are doing or where they’re riding - great way to stay in tune with the community and I don’t know why giving someone kudos on all of their rides should be an obligatory part of that.
I think it’s a great platform and I think the amount of historic rides/data are also super helpful. Another reason why I think amateurs hiding their power numbers is silly. It’s takes away value of the platform and really doesn’t give you any real benefit…
Good point
And when you know why FB was created, you realize that it IS a steaming pile of horse poop!
It was created as a way to terrorize and harass students at the uni they were at. Seriously. It started as a way to bully women and it’s lived up to that past very well. It’s an equal opportunity hot mess…
There are some good things that have come out of it, but in totality has it been useful to humanity, a net positive? Hell no…
And Twitter/X is proof of the power of noxious ‘social media’. The capability to misinform and disinform people. Yikes…
But back to Strava. I don’t think it would be as successful it it didn’t have some ‘social’ component.
Dropbox? You can even email links to your latest pics there.
Wow, the negativity of this thread. I like seeing my friends’ rides and the pics they took. Some videos of crazy things the mountain bikers do, and nutty things people see on the mup. I like seeing if there’s snow on the mountain or contruction somewhere. I like being able to say wtf to my friend that just did 200 hard miles without him having to brag about it in conversation first. For friends who have moved away, or competitors I got to know who go back to their local scenes, it’s fun to get a glimpse of the cycling culture in other places and stay in touch with people who may come visit or come back again for next year’s stage race. The stupid ride titles are fun, and so are the segment fights.
Not to say I don"t wish they would work on good features (group chat, auto selecting the right bike), and the API change is stupid. But… meh. I have not noticed an exodus.
The clubs functionality can be improved also, by keeping a history of the events and you could have the stupid LLM write a summary with some pics or something like that.
I don’t know if it still exists or if you have to pay for it now but I used to use Photobucket.