Strava is deleting millions of users’ activities

Strava is back defending the honour of its users, but with a much warmer reception this time. That’s because the social fitness platform is deleting users activities. Millions of them. Anything that’s incorrectly tagged or improperly cropped. Gone. Straight to jail. Deleted and removed from leaderboards.

The new policy, which Reddit commenters seem quite happy about, replaces Strava’s previous process of users flagging suspicious activities. Instead, Strava’s taught a Machine Learning model to detect suspicious activities. The platform then combed the leaderboards of millions of leaderboards and just deleted anything that didn’t look right.

Crimes of user error

Strava is striking back at a few specific groups of offenders, whether their Strava crimes are intentional or not.

First, e-bikers. Strava says it deleted 2.3 million activities that were improperly categorised as normal rides.

Second, drivers. Forget to press stop at the end of your ride and drive home? If you didn’t crop the vehicular portion of your ride out, the whole activity could now be one of the 1.6 million additional rides Strava’s deleted.

Third, run-bikers. If your device automatically sets an activity profile and you don’t go in and change it, say if you bring your Garmin head-unit for a run instead of buying a separate Garmin for running, Strava is cracking down. Strava didn’t say how many of these improperly classified activities it deleted.

To do all this, Strava’s trained three Machine Learning models. One each for vehicle detection, rides-on-runs, e-bikes-on-rides. Strava goes into detail about how exactly it does this, and great detail about how its strategy has developed. Which is kind of interesting until you remember you’re reading about people being extremely serious about posting their fun little hobby for others to see. But have at ‘er, if you want. It sounds like it was a hard problem to figure out.

Renewed glory

After deleting all these rides, i.e. the hard work, comes the glory. Strava’s combed through the top 100 activities on every global ride segment leaderboard (or taught its machines to) to ensure they are “as free from vehicles, incorrect sport types, and e-bikes as possible.”

The result? “293,000 athletes restored to their rightful spot in the top 10,” according to Strava’s proclamation on Reddit.

Like Arthur lifting Excalibur from the stone, you have now been returned to your throne. Or top 10. Or top 100. If not? Well, you probably can’t use e-bikers as an excuse anymore. Better get back on Zwift.