I'm with DC. Mostly "meh" but has its occasional uses.

I wonder if this is gendered. from my side I don't mind - strava feels like a natural way to connect with people I care about. more so than, say, Facebook.

but apparently between 75 and 80% of users are male. and a lot of the concern I'm hearing is from women saying "oh boy, now I'm going to be getting a bunch of messages from creeps!"

it definitely happens...

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

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"FTP is a bit 2015, don't you think?" - Gustav Iden

ah, that's good

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https://lshtm.academia.edu/MikeCallaghan

http://howtobeswiss.blogspot.ch/

There's an article from the independent going quite extreme on this argument.

I understand the risk of social media but Strava has pretty decent privacy options nowadays, the feature is effectively opt in and you have a few options on how to set it up. Is there anything more they could do?

This is the real frustrating thing. There's a lot wrong in this world, particularly around this exact conversation. But, Strava messaging isn't the target. It frustrates me reading these articles when the lady has done damn near next to no research on this particular feature.

Is she really concerned about someone messaging her to figure out where she runs but at the same time posts her exact GPS route for her run? She mentions that Strava is really good around privacy and yet fails to mention that this new feature has all of those same privacy measures...

I only joined Strava a couple of weeks ago for the 100 runs in 100 days challenge, and I have been bombarded with messages like "congrats, you just ran your fastest time in the 3" and "This was your longest run of the month" and so forth.

There is another version of the 100 run challenge going on which is not using Strava due to concerns with processing health data, though as far as I can tell there is no health data on me in Strava...other than possibly age, gender, etc.

I think is the typical "I am looking for attention, so then I can whine and bitch to my friends about it"

I think Strava messaging makes sense, but perhaps an option is text only, otherwise it won't be long before a bunch of morons start sending dick pics to the chicks.

At the moment it is text only (plus a convoluted way of sending GIFs based on a search). You can't add your files directly

Idk the setup but maybe they could limit it to DMs only from people you're following back. Seems like an easy thing they could do to get in front of stuff like this which will definitely happen.

Still waiting for Strava to compile race courses in an easier way & to make it a lot easier to search for routes in new places.

That's the default setting. You can only receive messages from people YOU follow. If you get random dick pics from some dude it's from some dude that you chose to follow. This is far and away more protective than messaging on instagram or facebook or tiktok. I'm not even a big fan of strava, just less of a fan of manufactured outrage.

With the amount of pros on strava it makes sense to default it to this setting. The real trouble wouldn't be unsolicited advances, but a torrent of "CHeck out my youtube", "EXLUSIVE link to my FREE training plan", and every Joe Schmo under the sun messaging Blu and Sanders for how to finish their first ironman.

To be fair it's not just chicks who are targets. Strava went through a really bad patch a while back where I was having (presumably dudes or bots) constantly send me Follow requests where the profile pic was a hot chick.

To Strava's credit they appear to have defeated that type of phishing scheme as I haven't gotten one in a long time.

Thankfully never have had many issues with bots in Strava, but many times a message feature would have been convenient.

I believe you can turn all those messages off in the notification settings. As far as health data, you don't even need to put your real age of course or gender (but that may be an issue if you are taking KOMs or CRs from folks - that's a whole other matter! lol).

I have a facebook and Instagram account, and I have zero friends and all the privacy settings are locked down and all notifications are off. I don't use my real name, gender or age or even city. I just use the accounts to find info on cycling events periodically.

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I'd say 95% of fake users infiltrating the Facebook ride groups I'm on are "thirst trap" females posting random crap links to something that should have never gotten and add to the group from admins.

If this can substitute the 100-odd people we have in our "local-group-ride-Whatsapp-group" that I cannot mute 100% and that produces some 200+ daily nonsense messages, then god-bless!