road.cc Strava interview - any questions folks?

What revenue streams come from the actual data we upload, and what controls do they keep on that data? The revelations that came out of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica affair demonstrate that, once the data is out the building, it can be used for anything and to hell with license restrictions.

I'm curious to know what uses - good and Orwellian - it is put to. 

Question for him: Do pro atheletes get paid to add their activities to Strava? Do Pro's get any other features that us mere mortals don't (other than a nice little badge).

What does he think of Veloviewer?

Can we add custom activity types? For instance I was doing skijoring (dog-assisted cross country skiing!) and dog sledding in Norway, and other similar activities such as dog-sledding. It would be great just to have 'custom activity' type so that we can add other things.

As for other features, I would love the ability to filter my feed. I have to delete lots of pro atheletes I would like to follow otherwise my feed is full of pros riding every day and I miss my mate's rides. Equally it would be cool to filter out commutes, indoor rides and limit rides to those that start in a geographical area.

Probably too late now, but why can't indoor cycling be separated from outdoor cycling?  If I am trying to ride 200km a week, with no facility for riding indoors, I don't want to compare myself to people who might ride the whole 200km indoors.  it is NOT the same!

I'd like to ask him whether they plan for any updates to their 'clubs' support?

The cycling community replies on Facebook (which not everyone is on) and emails (which we currently get a pitiful 60% open rate from via the British Cycling broadcast system - which is also woeful btw) for communication with club members, Strava is in a unique position as an almost universally used to help club communications, promote rides, give updates etc.. and yet it's nye on useless as it stands. I would pay for better 'club' functions or even a standalone club management app linking to strava. 

Do they have any 'big plans' in this area?

I gather from the comments section in today's article on France banning cycling  that some French busybodies are scouring Strava to see who is still riding their bicycles and then sending them rude notes. And people wonder why I avoid social media ...
 

I'd like to be able to remove certain segments from a ride, like really short segments e.g. anything under a minute or 800m, or even better a combination like under a minute unless it has a gradient of >5%.

I'm only bothered about climbs or longer segemnts which mean something not having loads of segments where I might have done them in 17 or 18 seconds.  So if there was a choice of tick boxes with different criteria which you could exclude, that would be an improvement for me.

There is a clever tool that lets you automatically tag a ride between two specified places as a commute (https://blog.strava.com/powered-by-strava-apps-12402/ and http://commutemarker.com/), so can you make an option to filter commutes out of strava feeds? 

I log my commutes, as do some of my friends, but I don't really want to see them every day and I'm sure other people don't care about mine either!

Two things I would like to see...... for cyclists with an ebike can a simple check box be inserted on the upload page, probably adjacent to where you select your bike, checking this should generate a little lightening sign adjacent to all your strava segment times in the leaderboards generated from that ride.

The other thing is removal of silly times set by people ie. 40 mph plus up 20% hills. With the use of a simple algorithm and a ceiling of say 125%, taking into account gradient, length and time, anything over the ceiling is not registered. 

Rouvy, and I assume other training apps, allow riders to train in 'assisted' mode, in which it is possible to inflate your performance by > 300%. Rouvy recognises that this should not be used in leader boards, and consequently prevent these rides from being seen by other riders. Strava however, do not check if uploaded virtual rides are of this type, and consequently they are skewing Strava leader boards.

However they should not be hard to detect because there is a mismatch between watts and performance and I  would have thought that developing an algorithm would be reasonably straight forward.

As we will all be spending more time on our smart trainers during the present crisis, this issue will become even more important.

I will be getting an e assist road bike soon (I hope!) to help me up the steeper climbs.

I would want to mark the assisted segments appropriately as I do not wish to fool myself or others that I have suddenly discovered climbing legs in my 70s.

Most of my ride will be unassisted so I don't want to recorded the whole thing as an e bike ride.

On top of some of the other suggestions, I'd like the web and app features to be better aligned. Some data and options you can only get on the web and not the app and vice versa. Also...some of the stats between the two don't always line up.

Maybe a configurable private messaging option to make it a proper social network?

I love Strava in general. Here is what I would like to make it better still:

Let relive do their thing again: it was great!

Introduce new features that would convince me to subscribe. I don't think there has been anything new for ages.

Better removal of cheaters

More and more varied challenges

Better when you do an activity such as getting to work, then forget to stop your watch, the do another and strava thinks you have been running for 14 hours so you have to delete the activity

The idea about making a segment into a route is also good

Allow people to nominate shitty segment to delete, or delete those not ridden in two years.

Award a Mayor for the most frequent rider on a segment, speed isn't the only metric.

But tell them to keep up the recent turn around. They seem to have learned that taking.features away and breaking things isn't the best growth plan.

Oh and let me turn a segment into a route.

Cheers me duck.