New Strava Local Legends feature gives you a trophy just for showing up

“There are plenty of “junk” segments on Strava”

Amen to that. I know it doesn’t really affect me, but I hate when there are dozens of overlapping duplicate segments on a stretch of path or road. I would sign up for a Strava ‘Super-Premium’ membership if it came with the ability to go in and clean my area up by deleting these (or just making them private for whoever created them). More segments isn’t always better.

Back to the new feature, it’s seems kind of neat and would be fun to see who hits segments super often so long as they pick good ones to have this feature on.

hands up for the commuters 🙂

This is a great idea! While I have a few KOMs under my name, this is great to motivate people to keep riding as not everyone wants to go fast. As long as Strava keeps on improving for their users, I think ppl will keep on paying.

I always felt they should’ve bought Sufferfest, as the ride data they collected over the years will help a lot for Sufferfest workouts and will make the training section more worthwhile then it’s now which is a joke in my opinion. Or perhaps Xert will be a better buy since it does use analytics to make a smart training profile which will benefit greatly from Strava data.

Strava’s pivot to entice more paid subscribers by restricting the leaderboards and not counting KOMs of unpaid members is having the reverse effect on me as a user. I have been a paid Summit member since they launched that program and I actually appreciated the tiered subscription model that allowed a subscriber to pay for the services that were wanted without the fluff of unused services.

Now, with my Summit membership expired and seeing the unpaid member version… I’m not inclined to continue paying. The routing feature has always been a joke and completely inferior to so many other alternatives from RWGPS, Garmin, Komoot, etc. The segments, KOMs, and leaderboards are no longer the motivating factor for me to continue engaging on the platform. They were for awhile… then that got old and tired when other riders started gaming the segments with digital doping, TTTing a segment to ensure it cannot be taken by a solo rider, waiting for a windy day in the right direction to KOM, and now with the introduction of E-bikes… game over.

I spent this morning deleting every segment I have ever created, public and private. The social engagement of following my riding buddies and peers will probably keep me from deleting my profile wholesale, but I feel certain my presence on the site will be greatly reduced.

Now, with this announcement of “Local Legends” they seem to be grasping at straws to rely less on the tippy-top of the leaderboards so as to pivot to participation trophies. To that end; I say meh.

Local legends means you must expose all of your rides publicly and, therefore; allow anyone looking at an area to view your activity, patterns of riding, locations, etc… in other words; the opposite of privacy. I, for one, have grown tired of being the commodity for the social network sites to market and continue reaping profit from my sweat (literally).

I deleted my Facebook profile in 2016 after the campaign and election, along with all the privacy violations. They have not only not improved on that front… but wantonly blown out the doors of any perceived privacy one might’ve thought they had. Instagram was deleted a year later, and that really just left Twitter and Strava for social interaction… I’m what they would classify as “low engagement” on Twitter but was sufficiently engaged on Strava with the Summit membership. I guess now I become a hermit… at least I still have email.