Year in Review

The above picture is from my most recent bike ride in the Verdugos. It was my first ride after disconnecting Strava and deleting my account. An account I’d had for over 10 years. I thought I’d feel… more than this.

My Strava account had 1,688 activities recorded into it. That included data recorded over the course of four different bikes, totaling 41,127 miles, 4,645,247 feet of elevation, and 3,315 hours, not to mention the dozens of hikes and occasional kayak outing (lol).

It’s not like this data is gone forever. Before I deleted my account, I exported the data and uploaded it into RidewithGPS. It also all exists in my Garmin account, which is where it’s recorded initially. I’m not totally sure if I’ll continue with RidewithGPS, but it already gives me more complete access to my ride history (ie my own data) than Strava did, and suits my needs (which for the most part is just looking back on previous rides to get an idea of how long things take).

There’s also a “friend” or “competition” side of Strava that I’m leaving behind. I had 51 “friends” but only interacted with about six of them regularly, and of those, I’m pretty sure half were the type to just thumbs up every post (I don’t mean this as a derogatory thing, just that it’s a passive activity and not really a sign that person gives a shit). As for the competition aspects, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel when I have the fastest time up my local hill. The personal records, king of the hills, etc were never really a motivating factor for me.

But anyway—why leave?

We all have our pet peeves and breaking points with apps, services, and subscriptions. Those thresholds vary from person to person. I stopped subscribing to Netflix because I couldn’t stand how the app rarely used the official movie cover art, and also shuffled the cover artwork constantly. It drove me so nuts I clicked that delete button and never really thought about it again (we’ll occasionally spin up a new sub for a month to watch something, but that’s become more and more rare). I bailed on Spotify years ago just because I didn’t like how it handled album libraries (Apple Music, for all its faults, did this much better at the time—working basically just like iTunes, though I have no idea how the two compare now). Earlier this year, after five years of paying a subscription for the writing app Ulysses, I moved everything into the open source writing software, Obsidian (Ulysses was solid, but paying $40/year for a text editor is an absurd ask) .

Likewise, I stopped using Amazon for both streaming and shopping because both had become unusable. Streaming just became one big ad, while shopping… well, that became one big ad too, as it was often impossible to find an item without scrolling. It’s hard to completely avoid Amazon, some stuff just isn’t available or is hard to get elsewhere, but pre-paying for shipping is an absurd ask on its own, let alone for a store that sucks to actually interact with.

All this is enshittification in action. The process is often so slow that it’s easy to miss until you find yourself just wallowing in the slop, wondering what on earth you’re doing with your time.

Back to Strava: my breaking point with Strava wasn’t singular—it was a series of small annoyances, each building on each other.

Over the last few years, the company has moved more and more features behind its paywall. Which is to say, it takes features that were once free and makes you pay for them. I am not opposed to paying for things! I don’t even hate subscriptions (when they make sense). But Strava’s value-add for me and the type of rider I am was always suspect. For example, one of Strava’s quirkier “features” was how it handled leaderboards. On a free account, you could see your place if you were in the top 10. But if you were, say, 423th out of 18,093 people, you’d get very little information. This is, ostensibly, “public” data, but Strava prevented you from seeing it.

Okay, so maybe you can say that Strava’s value-add is seeing your speed in the community. Look at me, I’m in the top 10th percentile! But the company also withholds information about yourself unless you pay for it.

For example, unless you pay for a premium subscription, you cannot see your time across similar historical rides, ie, I could not see my times across my weekday maintenance rides. It’s not like the data wasn’t there, it was, and it’s not like I couldn’t create my own series of filters to find it, I could. If I wanted to sit there and just keep a spreadsheet, I could do that.

As a service, Strava is an intermediary. It’s just a processor of data from another source (in my case, a Garmin). It has no value on its own. The company seemed to realize this when they tried to sue Garmin earlier this year (they bailed on this plan). Processing and analyzing data can be useful! Some people react better to certain types of graphs or data structure. Some people react more to “kudos” or leaderboards. But that doesn’t change the fact that Strava itself is rarely the place people record that data to begin with.

In any case, all these annoyances started to pile up, and throughout the year, in the back of my head, I was often like, “I should just delete this account, I don’t really get anything out of it.” That hummed along in the back of my mind, but I decided to wait it out until the year in the review sport was available. I have mixed feelings about year in review features (aka Spotify Wrapped-alikes), but I won’t get into that here.

This year, Strava put its year in review, a once-free end of year summary, behind the subscription. This is a feature mostly meant to promote the company itself that only shows data you can already access, but on a low effort slideshow. It’s stupid, but fun in its own little way. Sheesh.

There were other failings and failures over the last few years. Like every tech company, Strava tried to do some AI bullshit, which was somehow even less useful than whatever you’re picturing in your head right now. Free users (ie me) have also been inundated with in-app ads for the premium subscription. You cannot open the app without getting one. And the acquisition of Runna and general increase in runners on the platform likely signals that Strava’s plan is to be the everything sport app, a sure sign it will become unusable in short time (no offense to runners, skiiers, kayakers, and whoever else, this is just what happens when you try to appease multiple communities). All of this, likely, is because of Strava’s hope to hit Wall Street, which will be the final nail in the coffin.

Anyway, this blog isn’t about saying whether or not you should use Strava (or Spotify or Amazon or Netflix). It’s not about whether you should feel guilty about using them either, do whatever you want. It’s more a reminder to myself that the end of the year is good time to reassess who has my data, my attention, my money, and my time. If I’m not getting something from that, or if there are alternatives that might better suit my needs, then it’s a good time to switch.