Front Pack is a New Social Network for Endurance Athletes

If there was no Strava and they launched strava today by listing it as a social networking site, I’m guessing it would fail. You couldn’t even private message people until last year (like 11 years post launch) and posts (non ride entries) weren’t even a thing until a few years ago. If you look at facebook, less and less people actually post stuff about their lives. I’ve been on facebook for 20 years essentially just a month or two after it was opened up to my college. In that 20 years, I will think about someone who I haven’t heard from in a while and check their facebook to find it hasn’t had an entry in 6 years. The only people who are posting left and right about their lives are people hungry for influencer status of random followers. That’s why reddit has become so popular as it has kind of revived the feel of Forums and message boards pre-facebook. Its more anonymous and you can pop into that one community filled with experts when your dishwasher is broken then never return again once fixed vs posting blindly on facebook “any of my smart friends know how to fix my whirlpool”

Although the Social networking tools are kind of there on Strava, the majority of users just use it a log for their activities and for some competitive people, as another form of racing. For the longest time, people would “friend” me and unless they were in my area (and I actually knew them personally) I wouldn’t friend them back as I only wanted to see you in my feed if I could use your rides to find new roads/routes.

Even during social media’s Utopic hay-day’s, even if you had a better product, unless people are on there, its going to fail. Look at the original Google+. It was essentially facebook with some improvements here and there. However at the time, facebook had such a stranglehold, no one ever posted to it and it died or really just transformed into a glorified yellow pages/yelp for businesses. Now 20 years past the intro of mainstream/modern social networks, the ones that are thriving are more for lurkers. For tictok, while you can journal your life there, most just use it as a time waster watching mindless videos and never post anything themselves. I am guessing by this time next year, it will be dead.