There’s really only one Zwift/Strava segment that I care about, so this doesn’t impact me personally, but I do have to wonder why Strava cares so much about the segments for Zwift that they felt the need to only allow one authoritative source. How is this different from the real world were the more popular pop to the top, and the less end up at the bottom of the list? Don’t they already have an algorithm for that?
Personally, I suspect that there’s more going on here than just the desire to “keep indoor athletes motivated”. Removing segments that you don’t care about doesn’t impact you in the least, but removing the ones that do… isn’t… umm… motivating. Unless it’s a nefarious push towards Trainer Road?!?!
Given the large and competitive user base on Zwift, no mortal has any realistic possibility of ending up in the top X (where X is some obscenely large number) on any segment, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the real reasons behind this move are either: a strange attempt to get more people to pay for Strava so they can see that they are 9,123 of 34,568 riders, or because there’s a system performance wall in Strava’s system that they were going to hit, and this is a preemptive strike to “solve” that problem.
I woke up this morning to several emails from Zwifters wondering what was going on with Strava segments. One rider said, “I rode for an hour in Watopia, and Strava only popped up with three segments. They were all Zwift Insider verified, and they were all hidden!”
It appears Strava flipped a switch overnight, marking all Zwift segments as private unless they were created by our Zwift Insider account.