Not every damn thing needs to be “social”.

Perhaps not, However Gamification of fitness is huge motivation for many people to keep exercising and maintaining the rhythm which in fitness is quite important.

Such social sharing + gamification systems are no different than Github contribution streak or StackOverflow awards for streaks etc. Those streak award only benefited the platform, while awarding us fake points and badges, the fitness streak rewards and social sharing benefits the users health so arguably has a stronger case for being gamified.

We can argue all day that people should want to do fitness to be healthy, not on how they look or other people see them or their fitness, but reality is that the social component of fitness is a big part for many people be it at the gym or in an app.

	▲	xp84 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Logging is one thing, syncing it to the cloud is unnecessary and shouldn’t even be the default; making any of the location data available publicly is just terrible. If you want to share an individual workout map so you can say you circumnavigated Manhattan or whatever, fine! Share that one workout with your friends! (And ideally as a freaking screenshot rather than some database) Anything else is far too risky.

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embedding-shape an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fwiw, from the people I know using Strava, it's less about the sharing/reading other's efforts aspect that makes them use it, and more because of the analysis, dashboards and stuff like that.

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dkga an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes, all of which can be purely personal and not shared beyond the device.

	▲	alexfoo an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but many people want to use Strava for more than one purpose. a) Analysis and tracking of your own personal goals. (Some of the tools are better than the stuff available on the device itself.) b) Sharing and socialising some other activities. You can be careful and only allow certain activities to be public but you'll make mistakes and eventually many people will just think "whatever, I'll just default to public and remember to hide the ones I don't want to be public" and then it's even easier to make mistakes. Defaulting to "opt-in" is all well and good until a human makes a mistake.

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LightBug1 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with you ... but gotdamned if I don't see another unasked-for shared workout stat.

I have the family exercise group on mute, lol

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Forgeties79 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

No but every damn thing seems to be that way by default, so we are expecting everybody to opt out rather than opt in most of the time