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Comment by chihuahua | Hacker News Reader

Over the past 5 years, Strava has aquired the reputation of not fixing any bugs and not adding any useful features. Instead there was just a little bit of churn in the UI, annoying most users. A better way forward might have been to keep existing features for everyone, but add a number of useful new features for paying subscribers.

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> A better way forward might have been to keep existing features for everyone, but add a number of useful new features for paying subscribers.

I completely agree here. I think removing features to paid will always leave many users upset.

If you don't have a good monetization plan from the beginning, then I think the safer approach is to put new features under paid and make that the value add.

But making your product worse, and making users pay to just get back to what it was? ugh.

Also I think this will hurt them more than the expect, as they kind of are a social media platform and removing the free 'social' part will drive away a lot of users that might have considered paying at some point.

I would be happy to subscribe if Strava would just add support for triathlon activities. They've been promising that literally for years with zero progress.

I can attest to this. A HealthKit duplication bug (all your rides got duplicated in Apple Health app) was lingering with Strava for over 2 years. A large group of people interacted with their support/engineering to fix it, nothing came out of it, people left.

To be fair on Strava, they have made some effort to addressing this over the last few months:

https://www.strava.com/subscription/whats-new

But now it's kinda obvious they only did this as ammo in preparation for today's announcement. I sincerely do hope they continue to add new features, there is a huge stack of requests and ideas still waiting in their support forums.

No, they did it because they lost entire years following ill-advised growth fantasies into nonexisting markets where every yoga session, every treadmill workout would somehow be a "Strava moment" and that would magically pay their bills. They completely neglected their incredibly successful (within scope) but not quite profitable core business. A few months ago they switched to salvage mode, going through those years of accumulated backlog at dangerous speed. And now this, it's just a sign of desperation. It certainly shares the cause with the changes before but I wouldn't call one the buildup for the other.

Hands down the best summary of what seems to be going on I've seen.

I vaguely remember new features some 5+ years ago, or promises of fixing issues (that are still there), but that had stopped and all we got was a social-network-like feed. One would think with the data they have Metro would be able to profit from free users, but I guess not?

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