Strava puts popular “Year in Sport” recap behind an $80 paywall
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Nobody is saying that in this discussion. Please try to read more closely. "Slippery Slope" is an informal logical fallacy. If you perceive that objection to this fallacy is spreading, that suggests that clear, logical rhetoric is growing, which is a good thing.
Garmin has never taken a feature away from fitness products and placed them behind a subscription, so a slippery slope argument is improper.
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I have been a premium member for years. I do not think that anyone is missing much if the only thing they are worried about is the Year in Sport recap. It’s a glitzy bauble that tells me nothing I don't already know that my subscriber page does. I do not care how many kudos or local legend awards I get, and I do not care to wait 60 seconds to see it all in a slowly unfolding animation. As to the fee, what I pay for the app is about the same as the cost as two movie tickets and dinner. I probably could not have afforded this in my 20s, but on the other hand, Strava provides a service and is entitled to be paid what the market will bear, just like Microsoft, the New York Times, Apple Music and any given porn site.
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I for one don't see that as enshittification (though I'm sure we could all have an enjoyable no-true-scotsman argument about just what the definition is).
Enshittification (as I for one recognise it) is when a company degrades a service without changing anything else, because (and I think the ‘because’ is important to the definition) their customer base is inelastic: locked in, one way or another. Thus they can lower their cost base, by making the product shitter (as opposed to simply producing an equivalent product more efficiently), without damaging their revenue base. This annoys lots of customers but (locked in, remember) the company gets away with it and the VCs are happy. Boo!
That doesn't appear to be what's happening here. They've tweaked their business model by starting to charge for a service that was previously a loss-leader. But they haven't (as far as I can see from this article) changed/enshittified that particular service. If they've been smart, their revenue will rise; if not, it may fall. Enshittification is infuriating; but this appears, in contrast, to be simply... business.
I generally prefer to use, and produce, free (as in libre) software, partly because it tends to avoid this sort of issue. But if there's commercial software I want to use, I'd rather pay for the software plus a promise that I'm not otherwise monetised, than get the software for free (-as-in-beer), because the ‘free’ will be paid for some other way (as we all know, here, of course). Paying for good software seems a more honest way of supporting developers, on my part and on theirs. The next version of that software may cost more, or a loss-leader part of it may turn into a paid-for part, and that will affect whether I decide to upgrade, but I don't resent that – I'm just making a purchasing choice.
A loss-leader being converted to a subscription product is tough, but that's subtly but significantly different from the enshittification problem.
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This ridiculous paywall is one reason I left Strava. The software UI is poorly designed and updates are rare. Switching to another provider made my information easily accessible and more user friendly. Finally, I'd argue that we're going to see these micro-charges and constant fees for use crop up more and more in everything (GM car audio and navigation in just one example).
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I saw it pop up and laughed. Jokes on them as I only record about a third of my sports on Strava (only outdoors stuff).
So it would hardly reflect reality anyway.
So it would hardly reflect reality anyway.
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I'm curious what you're using as I've been thinking of moving for a while.
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Longtime Strava user. I just don't get the framing of this article or all the hate in the comments.
I have long been more than happy to shell out $60 or $80 to Strava, one of my favorite purchases of the year because I get so much value from their service.
I get that we all want a free lunch but what do you want Strada's business model to be?! Their software engineers need to eat too. The options are get people to pay (best) or in-App advertisements (terrible) or sell people's data (worst).
The other comment that was suggested "getting people to pay is the opposite of enshittificaiton" got crushed and I imagine mine will too. But it feels right on.
If you have some better idea for how Strava (or any media company) should have the needed revenue, let us all know the secret.
I have long been more than happy to shell out $60 or $80 to Strava, one of my favorite purchases of the year because I get so much value from their service.
I get that we all want a free lunch but what do you want Strada's business model to be?! Their software engineers need to eat too. The options are get people to pay (best) or in-App advertisements (terrible) or sell people's data (worst).
The other comment that was suggested "getting people to pay is the opposite of enshittificaiton" got crushed and I imagine mine will too. But it feels right on.
If you have some better idea for how Strava (or any media company) should have the needed revenue, let us all know the secret.
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No, it's a defined term because it was created by Cory Doctorow. There are three phases of enshittification.
Phase 1: Be Good to Users. The platform uses subsidies (often from venture capital) to offer high value to end users at a loss.
Phase 2: Be Good to Business Customers. Once users are locked in and it becomes difficult for them to leave (because their friends or data are stuck there), the platform shifts its focus. The platform uses those locked in users to bring businesses to its commercial model.
Phase 3: Be Good to Shareholders (The "Enshittification" Phase). Once the business customers are also locked in—meaning they depend on the platform for their livelihood or reach—the platform turns on them too.
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Yeah, way to go Cory. Give a roadmap to all the rectal sphincters that hadn't figured it out on their own.
/s
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For what it's worth, yes he coined this term, but Wikipedia suggests that the idea had been knocking about for a while before that (that fits my recollection).
Exactly. The presence of lock-in seems integral to the idea of enshittification. If the users are locked in, then you can decrease your cost-base by degrading the service, without affecting revenue or the VC payoff. There's lots of examples of services where users are heavily locked in: Amazon (Doctorow's prime example), Facebook, etc, which are heavily enshittified.
But if there's no lock-in, then I think you must use a different term for what's happening. Namely: it's a loss-leader being withdrawn.
I don't use Strava, so I'm only going on what's reported in the article. Several comments have mentioned apparently similar services people can migrate to, and have mentioned that it's possible to download your data from the service. That seems to very clearly indicate that users are not locked in; they can exit. OK, it may be inconvenient to shift, and it sounds like there's some social element to Strava that people will miss – it looks like Strava are selling something people want to have, and the company is clearly banking on those people liking it enough to pay more to continue to use it – but Strava is not compulsory.
I don't use Strava, as I say, so don't have a stake in that aspect. But I do care about some other optional services of that type, and I care about various bits of software both libre and commercial. I also care about, for example, news sources such as Ars. These things are luxuries to a greater or lesser extent. But – and this is the point I get quite exercised about, and which others have made in the comments as well – those things have to be paid for: if I'm not prepared to put my hand in my pocket from time to time, then I have no right to complain if they disappear.
What I'm seeing in some of these comments, related to Strava in this case but it's a more general problem, is a certain air of entitlement on some people's part. Something that was free, isn't free any more. But there's minimal lock-in. Thus it's not enshittification (fancy term!) – it's just that the prices went up. That's annoying, and it may be an imprudent business decision on Strava's part, but it's not a societal problem, and I believe it's unhelpful to paint it as such.
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Dunno why people are surprised.
This whole playbook is so damn old now.
Get them in the door free, then turn the screws.
This whole playbook is so damn old now.
Get them in the door free, then turn the screws.
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Someone should write an app to create the same Strave Year in Review from the data for free
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Yikes, what a bad take.
They took a popular feature and attempted to get people to pay for a subscription they didn't otherwise want in order to extract payment from users.
According to Cambridge Dictionary:
"Enshittifcation: the process of a product or service, especially one connected with the internet, social media, or technology, becoming or being made worse, more unpleasant, less useful, etc.:"
And that's all that happened here.
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This is incorrect, at least for Google/Meta.
Here's how your privacy leaks:
I can make an ad campaign targeting fairly sensitive properties of you (orientation, people who like websites like X), and Google will happily tell me which completed sale came from which campaign. So if you came to my website after seeing my "gay man" campaign, I have learned what Google thinks about your orientation.
I have to assume Strava sells data to intermediaries like "bongle@bongle.com has an FTP of 300, uses zwift, doesn't have a smart trainer, rides with a carbon bike, and has privacy-marked a circle centered on 1234 fake st. They're Strava friends with emails a, b, and c."
That is a juicy pile of info about my health status, location, wealth, and relationships.
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Yup – that's called ‘market capitalism’. ‘Trying to screw more money out of customers’ is what people have been doing ever since markets were invented.
That's not ‘enshittification’.
...and neither is that. That's a poor definition, because it misses the key feature consistently stressed by Doctorow in the various things he's written about it (2022 blogpost, Locus magazine 2023, FT 2024). That key feature is monopoly (with a side-order of monopsony), and the corporate vices that come along with it.
‘Enshittification’ covers an old problem: when companies gain a monopoly, the market fails. Companies like Amazon and Facebook seem to be working with a checklist of all the different ways a monopoly can be bad for customers, and systematically working through them. And – Doctorow's larger point, I think – these companies are positioned in such a way that this can cause societal damage. The enshittified ‘service offering’ is just a symptom.
Worse, companies like Amazon and Facebook have got to the point where they're not just a monopoly, but a compulsory monopoly – it's hard not to use them, and there are even some (developing) countries where the economy is partly built on WhatsApp. That has negative effects that go way beyond merely being a monopoly.
Strava might be a major player in their market segment but (if the comments here are to be believed) there are alternatives – they're not a monopoly. No monopoly => not enshittification.
This isn't mere pedantry on my part. Enshittification is bad, and we all have to be clear about what it is, and why it's bad, and to recognise it when it appears, and when it hasn't. It is not just a fashionable word for ‘annoying market capitalism’. Doctorow isn't banging on about enshittification because he's an enthusiast for the ideology of market economics and wants best value for consumers; he's warning it will damage our society.
Carelessly expanding the term to mis-label this case – just a crappy web service that's put up its prices and annoyed some of its users – dilutes that focus, and the subsequent normalisation of it helps Amazon and Facebook get away with it.
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What they're likely trying to do with their attitudes behind their garmin lawsuit is get to the point where the devicemakers (garmin, wahoo, etc) and API users (Zwift, Rouvy, Trainerroad) have to pay Strava to put the data into Strava. Strava is likely hoping that they're a big enough dog culturally in cycling that they can pull that off.
I could see a world where it's a selling point that a Wahoo headunit has direct upload to strava (which Strava gets Wahoo to pay for and Wahoo rolls into their MSRP) while a no-name Chinesium one doesn't.
That said: do I think a Strava funded by headunit maker's API fees would revert to the glorious every-feature-is-free era of the 2010s? Nah, they'd just enjoy the revenue spike for a few years until someone else attached a website to a FIT parser and database.
This won't happen, but a VC can dream: FIT files actually include the manufacturer/make/model of every device recorded. Strava could not only shake down the headunit mfgs, but could shake down even the measurement device manufacturers! Dream of being an evil VC, and magine this for a walled-garden future:
User: Uploads FIT file to Strava
Strava: "Sorry, 4iiii hasn't paid for Strava powermeter decoding and and Abbott hasn't paid for their glucose monitor data to be stored in our DB. For $10/mth, would you like to add power and glucose data to your subscription for them? You should get a powermeter from our partner X, who has paid for power data."
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Route Builder is indeed an amazing feature. And worth $80/year to me on its own. (Not saying its worth that much to everyone!
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Definitely a case of to each their own.
I'm old and slow. The last thing in the world I want to do is compare my run times with other people.
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Ha, it's worse than that because if you've been using Strava for many years it gives you a convenient graph of how much slower you are today vs. ten years ago on the same route. This is also behind the subscription fee so if you're picking up speed on the downslope of middle age I guess don't subscribe to Strava.Definitely a case of to each their own.
I'm old and slow. The last thing in the world I want to do is compare my run times with other people.
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Acting like you're too big to fail / too big to care is a crappy corporate thing whether they're technically a monopoly or not. They're betting on the switching cost ("all my friends are on strava!") being too high. Could be a hilarious blunder if they lose more users. It's certainly Yet Another Misstep in a year of them.
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Strava just gets harder and harder to enjoy. Do they even know what their end game is?
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I doubt it. I think they're floundering, trying to find ways to get revenue to make them attractive to a buyer, without any long term plans. Their actions of late - including suing Garmin, of all things! - don't suggest any coherency to what they're doing.
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As a Strava user, I don't care at all (own your data has been the rule for decades now). I would like to point to Ars that four seemingly random user complaints/quotes really don't add any value at all, and make it look like the article is bloated with a few complaints to make the situation look worse than it really is (but who really knows?). That type of reporting is beneath this site.
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My wife and I are both subscribe tp Strava largely because it has the biggest user base and is platform agnostic. Most people we ride/run with use Strava. We even have our own club to promote some rides we like to do. I don't mind paying a monthly fee as running the service costs real money and Strava is largely ad free (see below).
That being said, Strava doesn't understand a lot of the userbase. There is also no way that those making decisions on features are using the service in a meaningful way.
Athlete intelligence: A quick search revealed how to turn that off as it seemed to me it was made for the frail-ego types that need constant compliments of their achievements (or lack of). Absolutely useless.
Local Legends: Not a feature most people care about.
URL parsing: Strava started stripping out URLs from activity descriptions, comments, and posts for user protection. Turns out the parser looked for a period followed by a character other than space. People that put a description of their run with "13.1 mile run" had it altered to " mile run". For those that wanted to do an event with a link to a fundraising page got thoroughly screwed over.
App and website feature parity: Why, oh, why can't the website and app have feature parity? The biggest one I run into is on the website you can comment on a club event but not in the app. Seriously. Most people use Strava on their phone and the inability to post or even see comments on a club activity is beyond frustrating.
Gear: Lots of people, like me, like to keep track of component usage on their bikes. The rub comes when people swap components back and forth such as wheels (training vs race) or as those who wax chains know, chains. The only option for components is to retire or delete. No parts bin/garage/out for repair. Retire or delete. The community forums have numerous posts asking for this feature and it's still not there. But we have AI, local legends, and streaks.
Ads: While Strava says they don't serve ads, which while in the strictest sense they don't, they still do. They rolled out Fan Favorites in the Suggested Friends and I've seen a Chipotle in SoCal as one and a hotel in TX as another. I'm sure there are more but I just can't remember them. A lot of challenges are sponsored by companies and when somebody joins a challenge you see that numerous times in your feed across multiple days. So while not ads from the Google and Meta ad serving machines ads are there in a much more subtle way.
Strava also clamped down on what third parties can do with data provided by Strava:
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2024/11/stravas-changes-to-kill-off-apps.html
Basically if a third party has data provided to it from Strava it can only be used for that user; not shared into a larger group such as group coaching. A year in review type of function is also specifically prohibited.
As Strava prepares for an IPO they do need a plan to profitability and also a way to sustain their responsibility to the shareholders. The problem, it seems, is that manglement is absolutely going to alienate their userbase doing so. I wish them well in trying to find a happy medium. I'd much rather pay a REASONABLE subscription price and not be shown ads or have my data sold than be the product couple with the unending barrage of ads.
That being said, Strava doesn't understand a lot of the userbase. There is also no way that those making decisions on features are using the service in a meaningful way.
Athlete intelligence: A quick search revealed how to turn that off as it seemed to me it was made for the frail-ego types that need constant compliments of their achievements (or lack of). Absolutely useless.
Local Legends: Not a feature most people care about.
URL parsing: Strava started stripping out URLs from activity descriptions, comments, and posts for user protection. Turns out the parser looked for a period followed by a character other than space. People that put a description of their run with "13.1 mile run" had it altered to " mile run". For those that wanted to do an event with a link to a fundraising page got thoroughly screwed over.
App and website feature parity: Why, oh, why can't the website and app have feature parity? The biggest one I run into is on the website you can comment on a club event but not in the app. Seriously. Most people use Strava on their phone and the inability to post or even see comments on a club activity is beyond frustrating.
Gear: Lots of people, like me, like to keep track of component usage on their bikes. The rub comes when people swap components back and forth such as wheels (training vs race) or as those who wax chains know, chains. The only option for components is to retire or delete. No parts bin/garage/out for repair. Retire or delete. The community forums have numerous posts asking for this feature and it's still not there. But we have AI, local legends, and streaks.
Ads: While Strava says they don't serve ads, which while in the strictest sense they don't, they still do. They rolled out Fan Favorites in the Suggested Friends and I've seen a Chipotle in SoCal as one and a hotel in TX as another. I'm sure there are more but I just can't remember them. A lot of challenges are sponsored by companies and when somebody joins a challenge you see that numerous times in your feed across multiple days. So while not ads from the Google and Meta ad serving machines ads are there in a much more subtle way.
Strava also clamped down on what third parties can do with data provided by Strava:
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2024/11/stravas-changes-to-kill-off-apps.html
Basically if a third party has data provided to it from Strava it can only be used for that user; not shared into a larger group such as group coaching. A year in review type of function is also specifically prohibited.
As Strava prepares for an IPO they do need a plan to profitability and also a way to sustain their responsibility to the shareholders. The problem, it seems, is that manglement is absolutely going to alienate their userbase doing so. I wish them well in trying to find a happy medium. I'd much rather pay a REASONABLE subscription price and not be shown ads or have my data sold than be the product couple with the unending barrage of ads.
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Edubfromktown
Ars Praetorian
Never have and never will pay a dime for a $trava subscription! The UI and popup advertising and rah rah "good job" garbage drives me batty.
All of my data is stored in Cyclemeter. I pay $10/year for their "Elite" app upgrade in order to have the capability to upload data directly to my free Strava account.
All of my data is stored in Cyclemeter. I pay $10/year for their "Elite" app upgrade in order to have the capability to upload data directly to my free Strava account.
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My morale is as good as can be expected in this political climate but my morals are on a spectrum. You're full of shit if you say that yours aren't, my self righteous friend.
(edited for clarity)
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Local legends has zero training value, but the hit of dopamine I get when I steal it back from that rando bastard who rides the same route as me is awesome.
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I assume at some point they'll introduce tiered subscriptions or sport-specific subscriptions, etc. to allow people to enter at a lower price point. Once they're subscribed, even at a lower price point, users tend to stay. If you make it annoying enough to be on a lower tier, or offer a bunch of new features for the upper tiers, you'll pull people up to the premium subscription. The game plan is there for investors... especially ones who love the idea that the company will have even more data for them to use.
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Export your own data and put it into your Ay Eye service of choice!
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I used Strava for ages (liked the data, could put up with the social features) until they started getting more aggressive with subscriptions. Limped along on the increasingly kneecapped free option. Consider this a plug for HealthFit if you're on iOS — all the nerdy stuff I liked to see and super-smooth Health/Apple Fitness integration for one up-front fee, minus the paywalling or attempts to turn it into LinkedIn.
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