LesterOfPuppets

You know what the best thing for Mental Performance is?

KOMsssssss!!!!!!!

noisebeam

He is just one of several offenders and doesn't even ride regularly round here. On these specific segments where he has KOM I am not even in top 100 so I really don't care. It was more the concept of Strava going to crap by allowing this I was complaining about. I view Strava as a video game, not bike racing.

nycphotography

Thus the support ticket.

Everyone can (and probably should) emulate (or even cut and paste) my text and open support tickets on every obvious case you find.
Strava will likely get the idea eventually (provided they get enough support tickets) and will find some was to address these.

kbarch

I just saw that. You might have just asked him nicely to trim the ride, but then again....
I like to have faith in people, but something tells me he won't be giving up those bogus KOMs any time soon. Something like that profile photo maybe?

noisebeam

His ride was already flagged at one point. He had to have contacted Strava support to get it re-instated. He already had a chance to fix it, but instead refused to. Too late to ask nicely.

redlude97

I mean it's not, does anyone?

Hypno Toad

When I explain Strava segments to non-users, I say it's like Candy Crush ... with bikes. I think segments fun, but they're pointless.

OTOH Strava routes and heat maps are important and powerful tools.

nycphotography

I dunno, I think I disagree. While most segments are fun but pointless, there are definitely segments that are pretty important/useful. Examples I can think of (most of them are climbs > 5 min):

Bear mountain climb
Alpine boat basin to ranger station climb
La Union climb
Skyuka climb

drewguy

Yeah, it's outrageous (and I submitted a support ticket too, out of pique).

But I think that one has to go on in life and not worry too much about these things. Strava has various benefits, but it's clearly imperfect. More clearly they're not focused on a number of issues that some (or many) users care about, probably because those things aren't monetizable.

In situations like that the choice is simply not to use the product as much, if at all, and use it for what you *can* get out of it. Clearly claiming KOMs isn't of much value given how easy it is to cheat those and how little Strava cares to police it. So don't bother - instead use the segments for the value they create - tracking your own performance improvements. Strava doesn't care about cleaning up segments? create your own - make them private if necessary - and hide all the rest. Do with it what you can. And if you can't, then use Garmin or something else instead. (FWIW, I'm also feeling this way about Apple - kind of like the old days of iPhones that were <$1000 - so I'll use my old one that much longer).

noisebeam

Strava is mainly just a toy. It is fun to compete on segments against friends who you know don't cheat.
I too like the heatmap and automatic logging of my data.
I've never had an issue with the clutter of too many segments. It is the badly designed ones that are a bit annoying, but those can be hidden.
A friend told me that once ones has about a 50 KOMs you spend more time flagging cheaters than riding to keep your KOMs.

kbarch

Yup - like anything, it's what you make of it that matters.
No, they aren't the same as normally sanctioned races, but they correspond to something similar. In principal, I don't see how they'd be any more pointless than real races. They're just their own category or class, so it's just relative. After all, what's the point of a "real" race anyhow?

Some, like the ones you listed, are like bona fide races - a course or part of a course that one would normally expect one to approach competitively and try their best on - they may even be over the same course as one (consider the park loops, for example). But then there are a lot that seem to be just random fractions of a course, or something that a random guy from the neighborhood wanted to claim, or thought would be clever. There are a LOT along 9W and River road like that. But like you say, some of those rather pointless ones are a lot of fun - like Unnecessary Hill and IBM Bowl. Going Down on P*rnstar is just dangerous, though.

noisebeam

A race is typically same conditions, same day. Of course there are course records for race routes, especially for TTs.

rubiksoval

Most all of the good segments around here have a top ten generally composed of the fastest guys around here.

It's a pretty decent sounding board for how fast someone can go if they're keen on trying to measure up.

rubiksoval

Road races and crits aren't about going as fast as possible. They're about going faster than everyone else in your race. That's it.

noisebeam

Of course, but that is true of segments as well.

rubiksoval

No, it's not. Segments are about going as fast as possible.

Hypno Toad

More to my point, those top 10 riders on the local segment aren't likely going to talk about their KOMs, they'll talk about the race they podiumed. Don't get me wrong, when our club finishes high-speed pace-line ride, we all check Strava for new achievements, it is fun.

Edit - I do like to talk about the KOM I got on a rental beach cruiser while on vacation in San Diego (I always forget to tell people it's an obscure segment )

rubiksoval

Nah, we talk about KOMs all the time. I'd actually say we have more conversations throughout the year about KOMs than races, as there's just a bit more to going max speed than there is to podiuming a crit or something.

kbarch

Of course only a braggart will talk about his own achievements unprompted. But you'll never convince me that people who make their rides public on Strava don't care if others to notice when they get KOMs and top ten trophies on well-known segments.

kbarch

There's a guy from the city I started following after he stole a really good KOM I had when they repaved the road. He'll occasionally place in Masters or P12 fields. But I also notice he goes around and hogs all the KOMs on all the secondary and relatively obscure segments in my area. I hate him.

Hypno Toad

I guess that might be the difference, our club likes crit races, but we're mostly endurance and road race riders.

Riveting

I only view the "Following" leaderboard of segments, which shows the fastest segment times of only the riders that I follow. Who cares about the KOM done by the fastest possibly-unethical rider (that I don't follow) that had a hurricane tailwind (or worse, an e-bike, or a car).

drewguy

Yes, yes it is.

"Normally I wear protection, but then I thought, 'When am I gonna make it back to Haiti?'"

canklecat

Set up your own private segments and ignore most of the others.

Too many popular segments are potentially risky -- high traffic areas, finishing too close to an intersection or actually requiring blasting through stop signs and traffic lights to get anywhere near the top 10.

I only pay attention to the segments that are continuous for a mile or longer without any stop signs, traffic lights or vehicle traffic hot spots (places where cars tend to leap without looking into the road from parking lots or driveways). Oh, and some critter crossing zones -- there are a few places on my rural rides where I'll never crack the top 10 because I always slow down for certain zones where I've seen deer and other critters crossing from blind spots, thick trees, etc.

And I don't care what Strava admin do about contested KOMs. Until they offer something of tangible value, such as discounts or coupons for accomplishments within age groups, weight loss groups, etc., it's not worth worrying about. As a moderator on a photography website for years I watched the daily melodrama over the ratings and praise given to mediocre photos because some groups were better than others at gaming the system. There was nothing to win or lose so all the drama was pointless. Offer some tangible reward and, sure, it's appropriate for admin to step up their scrutiny of suspect users.

kbarch

Rather than "tangible," I think what you're getting at is that the difference comes when the prize has value in some context outside the contest. While cash and similarly valuable prizes connect the competition to the rest of life and the world in a certain way, by doing so they complicate matters. The old-fashioned idea that such prizes make the sport or game "unpure" is not so much a moral value judgement, it's a simple fact. What makes something a game is the way the rules are totally arbitrary, and they form their own little world where nothing else matters except those rules: "winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." Once prizes with some outside value come in, that little world that was created gets "contaminated" and it starts to become a business. But like I said, that's not a moral value judgement, it's just a complication, and it's totally understandable if the people who set the rules don't want to worry about the implications of making it (part of) a business.