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Comment by aczerepinski | Hacker News Reader

I want to see more niche social networks that are only for one thing. I actually really like Strava which is for workouts only. There’s no way to share pictures of inspirational text. I’ve never seen anyone abuse the platform by sharing a run that is actually 0.1 miles plus a rant about Fox News or anything like that.

If I were independently wealthy I’d spend my time building a newsfeed for musicians to share music things where it’s similarly impossible to post pictures of text or news articles. You’d need to be vigilant to prevent it from overstepping the way LinkedIn did.

The challenge is that if you can share photos or video or links at all, it becomes terrible.

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Agreed. What I love about Strava is it leverages some of the same darker parts of the human psyche that traditional social media does (desire for social status by showing off etc), but in doing so it encourages its users to actually do something extremely positive. It makes me think of how I'd like to see a really well made addictive VR based MMORPG that encouraged its users to exercise in some way to progress.

Not VR, but I’ve been wanting one of these too. Pokémon Go flirted with it with steps and egg hatching but I want a classic fantasy MMORPG where my workout is the grind and then the play part is all fun

My SO openly admits that she logs in more bicycling kms than she would otherwise have done thanks to Strava. She has also just managed to convince one of her close friends to use Strava, that person is also seeing a rise in the number of logged-in kms.

Reddit has destroyed the forum culture that basically owned this concept. The internet was a far less politized place before Reddit came along, and you could have a conversation on a forum between wildly different political opponents without knowing they were political opponents.

This is why I enjoy using Letterboxd. It's a social media silo with its own problems, but overall I find it more enjoyable because everyone is there for one reason: to talk about movies they've watched.

I wouldn't even mind if there were some ads on Strava. Like I've started subscribing with intention to support also this platform. I really like how there are similar-minded people, sharing their activities - photos, I can relax visiting this app. I think Strava will grow, so many features they can add for outdoors activities and so on. No politics, toxic content, great experience.

On the other side, there are social apps which just want me to spend as much time as I can there.

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