Prior to Strava, I became a member of BikeJournal, where I manually logged my rides. It was, and still is, a whole community. Yep, they still have competitions for stuff all the time. Before computers, I kept up with club members the hard way - reporting our mileage to each other when we showed up for rides, and old-fashioned 'pick-up' races. Strava may not motivate me, but being part of a community (like this one?) can make things more enjoyable.

Any attempt to factor in the wind is going to be a **** show - winds can shift quickly, gust erratically and terrain can make the effects very localized; yesterday, I saw two flags, about 100 yards apart, flying in different directions because of their surroundings. Docking people because there was supposedly a fair wind or giving others credit because there was supposedly a foul wind? Yeah, people ain't going to go for that.

Trying to do that would also set an unfavorable precedent. What would be next? Docking/rewarding based upon group vs solo? Bonuses for fatter tires or heavier bikes? No, just no.

As it is, everybody understands that wind is a part of the game and that, if they really want a crack at it, they need to work with the conditions, just like everybody else.

Cool stpry, bro...

Thank you for sharing. The conversation would have been so lacking without your contribution!

ok. i get it and that sounds reasonable.

could always drive a car for a kom i guess.

Whenever a conversation turns to Strava stats, I go into a coma. For me, nothing sucks the fun out of an activity faster than quantifying it.

There are a lot of good segments where I'm just not going to be in KOM contention, and that's okay. On those, I want to beat everybody I know, though. Or constantly improve my time. Or, if conditions are unfavorable, I want to see that my power and pacing was good, etc, etc. (This isn't to say that I'm looking to pound that segment every time I ride it, of course - everything in moderation, recovery rides are important, yadda yadda.)

Same. I try to get a couple PRs as each new season arrives, but eventually I won’t be as good as I used to be, and it’s great to be able to compare me now to me before and see how my training is stacking up.

I know someone that rides a velomobile and people kept flagging his rides because of that. So he had to make all his rides private. It really takes a lot of the functionality out of strava when you do that. He never really wanted to be KOM, but there is no way to opt out of it.

As far as people setting kom's in cars, I have seen things that make me pretty suspicious. People are doing some segments so fast it would be impossible to tell if someone slipped in there with an ebike, for example.

There are different activity types and amongst them are velomobile and ebike. So you are covered if you want to post to Strava in a velo or ebike.

I flag extremely fast times with no power and HR data, except if done by someone I know is really fast (city of 300K residents, so the pool of really fast guys is limited). It's easy to figure out how much power you need for a certain speed and if you are at pro tour level you're not a middle aged bloke recording with a phone with no other data who did 500km this year.
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Yup.

I always look at the ride analysis - most of the time, it's pretty clear that it was unintentional. On the speed chart, you'll usually them noodling along at 12-15mph for a while. Then there's a transition (looking at the Time graph, rather than the default Distance, is helpful in seeing transitions/breaks in the action) and then they're accelerating like monsters and have cruising speeds of 30+ mph. Yup - they forgot to stop recording their activity when they got back to their car.

Another red flag that I'll look for is the roads traversed - jumping on a highway is obviously not normal bike activity. Also, in my area, it's unusual for a cyclist, no matter how serious, to completely avoid bike paths and shortcuts.

E-bikes can be tougher to spot, but they do often have distinctive, lurching speed graphs; I assume that this is from bumping in to the limiter.

Last year, we had a guy in our area that kept intentionally recording rides in his car, scooping up tons of KOMs. He'd get flagged immediately by dethroned and used to his routine, but man, was it annoying, and Strava wouldn't do anything about him, other than let users police him. Odd.

For a while Wandrer.earth which pulls its data from Strava was a big motivation for me. But then I finished riding every road an unreasonable distance from home.

Filling in a heatmap each year still gives me plenty of motivation to vary my routes.

I live in a town of 100k residents and it's really hard to keep track of all the fast guys because half of that number is college students. Not that I really care, it's a bit of a joke that they show me the top ten on a segment since I will never be close. Even on downhills, wouldn't be prudent. I have discovered I don't bounce like I used to.
I didn't know you could see the entire ride, I'll have to look the next time I have a question. OTOH, as fast as some of these segment times are, I imagine that it's common for someone to go out and only ride fast for the segment.

I like tracking my performance on strava (especially as I am coming back from an injury due to being hit by a car). There are one or two segments that I made that I really like to push myself on. One of them I had had the KoM for a while, now I don't. The other, I had local legend for a while, now I don't. I push myself hard on those segments to try to improve my times, don't really care if I ever get the strava titles back. Most of my riding these days is done on Zwift (due to lack of comfort on the roads after being hit by a car). Again, I use Strava to track how I'm doing on segments I'm familiar with and compare to past performances. Never going to get a KoM on those segments, and I don't really care. If I can beat the other folks in my pack (or at least push them to hurt really bad), that makes me happy. Given that my height, weight, and heartrate have to be published on Zwiftpower in order to race, I don't really care about whatever other information that Strava publishes. I would be a bit nervous if it was easy to tell when I wasn't home, but I don't own a smartphone, so my rides only upload when I get back and my Garmin can get on the wifi, so it doesn't really bother me that someone knew I was gone for a couple hours but am now back.

And you are on this thread why?

To answer the question posed in the title. Piss off.

Even though it motivates me to compete against myself and others in my age range, my one knock is that it my average speed is always slower than my bike computer by 0.5 to 1.00 MPH, which means all speed/time measures are suspect. I will work to keep my average speed over 18 on my bike unit and then on Strava it reads only 17.5 but then it probably does that to everyone, so round everyone up. Still frustrating but like all the other data provided. When one is pinging cell towers, what do I expect?

Very nice. Welcome to ignore.

Oh, no. Whatever shall I do?

Unless your bike computer is a GPS unit, I would expect that the Strava reading is more accurate and that your wheel calibration is off, or your start/stop speed is rather generous, etc.

Bike Journal was awesome in its day. It felt more like a community. Ive carried over one of my friends from there to Strava and Facebook. It was cool to see the line ups of how far people were riding.

Just got hime from another ride. First thing I did after I sat down? Fire up Strava to see who’s soul I crushed today. (It was my own.) This post was motivated by Strava.

Hating Strava is a kind of virtue signaling. Like the people that say they never shop at Walmart.

This has nothing to do with any virtue signalling...I just don't need electronic software to motivate me to go for a bike ride.

Calling out virtue signaling is virtue signaling.