So What’s the Fuss About Those Strava Updates?

The recent large update to Strava didn’t go totally unnoticed:

etc.

The main reasons for frustration among users (at least the ones complaining on social media — I know that’s a biased representation of the whole population of users) are the addition of posts and changing the feed to be non-chronological. Let’s explore these changes in some more detail.

Posts: New channels for advertisements and spam?

When first being confronted with the ability to post arbitrary content, my initial thoughts (from the perspective of developing a product for smart training assistance) were “Wow! A new channel for content marketing!”. But soon, this initial euphoria was replaced by some concern about other parties being able to do the same. And would my followers really appreciate my marketing efforts on their feeds? The thing is that before the update, the only way to publish content on Strava was to create an account and record some activity, i.e. actually doing some exercise. That bar is significantly lowered by allowing anyone to create an account and post anything without doing the actual workout. Does this open the gates for unbridled advertisements?

This seems to be an issue especially for “open” clubs. It just takes a few clicks to create a Strava account, search for large clubs and start pushing advertisements and link spam to its members. I just tested this in one of my clubs and confirmed that members are seeing my senseless spam post as notifications (although the club post does not seem to appear on peoples’ feeds). How will Strava protect its users from abuse? Will there be some point in the future where we’ll start to see “featured” posts a.k.a. paid-for advertisements?

On the other hand, It shouldn’t be that hard for club owners to remove the one or two abusive members that eventually may pop up. And it doesn’t sound like a big deal for individual users to un-follow particularly spammy “friends”.

Chronological vs smart feed

The second source of outrage among several users is that the order of the feed was changed from chronological to “relevance-based”. I can see some advantages in that switch:

• when someone for whatever reason wasn’t able to post his/her activity immediately afterwards, followers would now still be able to see it at the top of their feeds, even after days,
• in theory (I haven’t seen it yet), the feed sorting algorithm should be able to highlight special achievements such as PR’s, exceptionally long distances, etc;

However, as explained here by Strava, the feed order is based on a learning algorithm that is trained on data from your previous interactions with the feed. This makes it essentially a black box and there’s no way to tell exactly what will be shown on top and why it does so. I can understand that this can be annoying for users that want absolute control over the user interface, but personally I don’t mind letting an algorithm find out what would be interesting to me (given that it does its job well).

Allowing users to switch between chronological — or relevance-based feed order seems to be an obvious win-win situation and low-hanging fruit for Strava Development.

Nothing to see here, please move along

For all you outspoken haters of the update: I’m sorry for not being totally on your sides. With some minor tweaking by Strava, everyone could be happy with the feed. And un-following spammers doesn’t look like a lot of work for users that don’t want to see non-activity posts.