Strava, The World’s Sweetest Social Network

<p>The ills of social media are well known by now.</p> <p>You&rsquo;ve got sociopathic big-tech algorithms ceaselessly scrounging for hot-button posts that rile the masses. You&rsquo;ve got doomscrolling. You&rsquo;ve got trolling and dogpiling and entirely new bespoke forms of coordinated harassment being A/B tested as we speak. You&rsquo;ve got Nazis,&nbsp;<em>literal&nbsp;</em>Nazis, all over the place now. You&rsquo;ve got the persistent low-key Heisenbergian uncertainty about the authenticity of your own everyday behavior &mdash; i.e. whether you&rsquo;re engaging in an activity because it&rsquo;s fun or because pictures of it will&nbsp;<em>look</em>&nbsp;fun when posted online.</p> <p>But I come here today not to recite these creeds with which you, fellow prisoner of the Internet, are well familiar.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m here to praise one of the sweetest and nicest forms of social media I&rsquo;ve ever engaged with.</p> <p>I will suggest that the success of this app is proof that it is, in fact, totally possible for us to&nbsp;<em>socially network</em>&nbsp;in a fashion that feeds and delights the human spirit.</p> <p>Which social network is this?</p> <p><a href="https://www.strava.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Strava.</a></p> <p><a href="https://www.strava.com/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Strava is a pretty simple concept</a>: It&rsquo;s a social network where people describe the exercise they&rsquo;re doing. You can manually type in an activity &mdash;&nbsp;<em>I played pickleball for 45 minutes</em>&nbsp;&mdash; or, more often, the Strava app can autotrack it: If I start cycling, I&rsquo;ll tell Strava I&rsquo;m on my bike and it&rsquo;ll track my distance and speed and how high I&rsquo;ve climbed. You can also have an activity-tracker, like a bike GPS or a Fitbit, squirt the info to Strava.</p> <p><a href="https://clivethompson.medium.com/strava-the-worlds-sweetest-social-network-377f16dcb0d5">Read More</a></p>