Kudos, leaderboards, QOMs: how fitness app Strava became a religion

Strava users may start as loners, only tracking their own activities, but the hope is that they will soon be hooked into tracking friends and peers, and that this will push them to go further and faster.

“I worked for a long time at the intersection of technology and communities,” he told me on the phone from the US last spring, “and at how technology brings people closer together, not turns into this dystopian thing of them spending time apart.”

The essential goal of any tech platform is to make you use it again. This is called “stickiness”. But one step beyond stickiness is community: the key is to embed a tech platform into someone’s life, including their friends and wider circle of acquaintances and fellow athletes they haven’t even met. Group encouragement is proven to have a positive ... See more