Strava, The World’s Sweetest Social Network
<p>The ills of social media are well known by now.</p>
<p>You’ve got sociopathic big-tech algorithms ceaselessly scrounging for hot-button posts that rile the masses. You’ve got doomscrolling. You’ve got trolling and dogpiling and entirely new bespoke forms of coordinated harassment being A/B tested as we speak. You’ve got Nazis, <em>literal </em>Nazis, all over the place now. You’ve got the persistent low-key Heisenbergian uncertainty about the authenticity of your own everyday behavior — i.e. whether you’re engaging in an activity because it’s fun or because pictures of it will <em>look</em> 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’m here to praise one of the sweetest and nicest forms of social media I’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 <em>socially network</em> 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’s a social network where people describe the exercise they’re doing. You can manually type in an activity — <em>I played pickleball for 45 minutes</em> — or, more often, the Strava app can autotrack it: If I start cycling, I’ll tell Strava I’m on my bike and it’ll track my distance and speed and how high I’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>