Strava Purge

[Chislenko]

Virtually every ride I go on segments I didn't know existed appear as if from nowhere. Many of these I consider pointless, they might be 200 metres or less. If these are part of the clean up I would see it as a positive step.

What's the value of a segment which takes 26 seconds to complete?

You could ask what is the value of a sprint finish in a GT stage which takes about the same time but determines the winner of a 100 mile stage.

To me it reads as "concentrate on the better riders" especially when they are quoting "iconic stages" like Mount Ventoux which lets be honest 99% of cyclists on Strava are never going to do. (I await someone coming along in a minute saying they have done it!)

 

[Sea of vapours]

To me it reads as "concentrate on the better riders" especially when they are quoting "iconic stages" like Mount Ventoux ...

It's just a badge though ... Their description of the new 'Verified segments' is:
'The most iconic and popular Segments will now have a badge to signify that the distance and elevation stats have been verified, and that Strava (and the community) recognize that section of road or trail as an “official” Segment. So you can know that when you’re going for the KOM on Hawk Hill it’s THE Hawk Hill.'
Around here (the Yorkshire Dales, Lakes and North Pennines) just about every 'iconic' climb, of which there are many, has a dozen or so segments going up the whole climb, with minimal variation between them other than their name, and then numerous shorter parts of the same climb which someone thinks is 'the best bit', or whatever. From my perspective, I'd rather not have to wade through ten 'My favourite bit of CLIMB X segment' to get to 'The whole of CLIMB X which most people think is the sensible segment'. Those former should always have been marked private, and there's a decent likelihood that they now will be, which seems to enhance the Strava experience for a majority whilst not removing the ability to see your own time on your favourite sub-segment if you wish to.

And a fundamental problem with very short (tens of seconds or less) segments, is that the errors in gps tracks affect them enormously such that a helpful error at each end can make someone appear to be very fast indeed (or very slow). (Not that the Strava page I linked above actually mentions 'short' segments at all.)

 

[Dogtrousers]

I guess this is the problem with crowd sourced data. Yes you get tons of data, but sometimes more than you want and sometimes of questionable quality.

 

[Chislenko]

It's just a badge though ... Their description of the new 'Verified segments' is:
'The most iconic and popular Segments will now have a badge to signify that the distance and elevation stats have been verified, and that Strava (and the community) recognize that section of road or trail as an “official” Segment. So you can know that when you’re going for the KOM on Hawk Hill it’s THE Hawk Hill.'
Around here (the Yorkshire Dales, Lakes and North Pennines) just about every 'iconic' climb, of which there are many, has a dozen or so segments going up the whole climb, with minimal variation between them other than their name, and then numerous shorter parts of the same climb which someone thinks is 'the best bit', or whatever. From my perspective, I'd rather not have to wade through ten 'My favourite bit of CLIMB X segment' to get to 'The whole of CLIMB X which most people think is the sensible segment'. Those former should always have been marked private, and there's a decent likelihood that they now will be, which seems to enhance the Strava experience for a majority whilst not removing the ability to see your own time on your favourite sub-segment if you wish to.

I think that just about sums up what I was saying

"I'm a good cyclist and I can measure myself over the whole hill and stuff those less competent people who may get a bit of enjoyment out of trying to better themselves over certain sections of the climb"

As for tens of thousands of us less able cyclists / runners creating millions of private segments that is only going to clog up the Strava servers even more which if I was a cynical person I might think the real reason behind this purge was to free up server space.

 

[steverob]

And a fundamental problem with very short (tens of seconds or less) segments, is that the errors in gps tracks affect them enormously such that a helpful error at each end can make someone appear to be very fast indeed (or very slow). (Not that the Strava page I linked above actually mentions 'short' segments at all.)

They do need to clean up the historical very short segments admittedly, but for a good few years now you haven't been able to create any segments under 0.5km long (or something around that mark anyway).

Personally I don't care where I place on the overall segment leaderboards; the only one I care about is the "my efforts" one - I like to know if I've got a PR, but that's about as far as it goes.

 

[Venod]

We have a segment locally where whoever created it set off then did a u turn in the road, if you ride it in the direction followed after the u turn your time is very quick for the distance, as it picks up the start of the segment, but you don't ride the distance to the u turn and back, I wonder if this will be picked up by the purge.

 

[Sea of vapours]

As for tens of thousands of us less able cyclists / runners creating millions of private segments that is only going to clog up the Strava servers even more

I'm sure there's an element of Strava wanting to save resource in doing this. That seems wholly reasonable. It's almost certainly not 'space' though, if by that you mean 'space to store the existence of the leaderboards and the existence of the segment', it's most probably computation resource for matching segments to a ride and generating leaderboards. If a great many segments become private then they only have to be matched when the creator traverses them, rather than for every Strava user. That is very probably a huge saving in computing resource, not to mention speeding things up.

 

[Chislenko]

I'm sure there's an element of Strava wanting to save resource in doing this. That seems wholly reasonable. It's almost certainly not 'space' though, if by that you mean 'space to store the existence of the leaderboards and the existence of the segment', it's most probably computation resource for matching segments to a ride and generating leaderboards. If a great many segments become private then they only have to be matched when the creator traverses them, rather than for every Strava user. That is very probably a huge saving in computing resource, not to mention speeding things up.

Yes but by each individual making private segments they then can't see, nor can other not so great riders see how they are performing against others.

Which goes back to my original thought that they are heading towards an "elitist" platform with a bias on "better riders"

The only problem with that is that if a lot of us plebs are taking nothing from the platform then we will stop paying which will eventually push up the price for those who are left.

 

[newts]

The article states they are deleting 610,000 segments worldwide, it's a drop in the ocean & will barely be noticeable at local level..?

 

[Supersuperleeds]

Forget the segments, I've just tried to plan a route and they have redesigned the route planner and it is unusable. If they don't fix it I'll be cancelling my subscription as that is the only paid feature I use. It's that bad Garmin Connect route planner is looking attractive.

 

[Dogtrousers]

It must be a bit of a downer if you take segments seriously and the pros come to town. For example if you live in Zurich. I was just looking at Pog's Strava for his WC win. All of the segments on the WC route will be maxed out with all of the top positions being from Sunday.

 

[T4tomo]

The article states they are deleting 610,000 segments worldwide, it's a drop in the ocean & will barely be noticeable at local level..?

Indeed there are about that many segments down every town's high street!

I would delete every segment under say 0.5km in length, get rid of of those little ones that some knobber has set up to try and see if they can be a KOM by sprinting somewhere most people wouldn't.

 

[Alex321]

Probably be my last year as a paid subscriber. Probably the only advantage of paying was to see the segments and judge yourself against your previous best and your cycling mates.

They are to purge loads of segments and reading between the lines of what they are saying leave only "worthwhile" segments.

Why not just read what they say, rather than reading "between the lines", when there is nothing at all in what they say to indicate they may be doing that.

So for those of us not in the first flush of youth shorter segments where we still may be able to compete look set to go and it looks like we will be left with "proper segments" e.g. long climbs etc.

Again, absolutley nothing in what they say to suuggest that might happen.

I know that a lot of people on here have a healthy dislike of Strava and their views have been expressed numerous times so for those people there is no need to reply to this post.

More interested in what other people who use the segments think or how they have interpreted the Strava Segment Message.

I have interpreted it very differently to you.

I interpret it as meaning pretty well just what they say. The large majority of segments to be deleted will be duplicates (*and where you have a time on one which is being removed, gthat will be moved to the duplicate being left).

The rest are ones that are both unused AND where the GPS data appears to be inaccurate.

 

[Alex321]

You could ask what is the value of a sprint finish in a GT stage which takes about the same time but determines the winner of a 100 mile stage.

To me it reads as "concentrate on the better riders" especially when they are quoting "iconic stages" like Mount Ventoux which lets be honest 99% of cyclists on Strava are never going to do. (I await someone coming along in a minute saying they have done it!)

They are only quoting those for their new concept of "verified segments". Which are the "most iconic and popular" segments. Only currently 500 such segments.

 

[Alex321]

I think that just about sums up what I was saying

"I'm a good cyclist and I can measure myself over the whole hill and stuff those less competent people who may get a bit of enjoyment out of trying to better themselves over certain sections of the climb"

It may sum up what you were saying, but it has nothing to do with what strava are saying.

All they are deleting are "any duplicate and unused Segments with bad GPS data. "

There is nothing to suggest they are going to remove the shorter segments that form part of a larger one.

As for tens of thousands of us less able cyclists / runners creating millions of private segments that is only going to clog up the Strava servers even more which if I was a cynical person I might think the real reason behind this purge was to free up server space.

I'm sure that is part of the reason, but probably only a small part.