- Strava is allowing users to post external links again
- The feature is available in descriptions and athlete profiles
- Announced in a blog post, the feature was originally removed in September
Strava, one of the best fitness apps, deleted almost all external URLs on its platform in September 2024, and stopped users posting them altogether. However, as of March 3, users can now post links again on athlete profiles, club descriptions, event descriptions and activity descriptions.
Strava took these drastic measures five months ago after what it said was “a sustained campaign of inauthentic content”, including bots reportedly linking out to pornographic sites.
However, shuttering all external links resulted in an outcry from its users, as in some cases, years of posted links to training plans, external blog posts and fundraising pages were erased overnight.
Strava reportedly even removed other content, including anything separated by a decimal point, according to users on the Strava subreddit, resulting in users with runs labelled ‘4.5km easy run’ simply showing ‘easy run’. Strava may have confused these run names with URLs due to the decimal point.
Strava’s now using AI to police its app
In October 2024, Strava posted on its Community Hub, stating: “Community safety is our highest priority, and we will take any action necessary to protect them. As this is an ongoing situation, we do not currently have a timeline for when the filtering of links will end, but we appreciate the community’s patience as we work to keep everyone on Strava safe.”
Yesterday (March 4), Strava’s Community Hub page was updated, stating “at the end of 2024, we temporarily removed links in response to a surge in harmful spam that targeted Strava users with fraudulent and misleading content. These attacks put our community at risk, so we immediately took action to protect athletes from scams and malicious intent.
We’ve been hard at work improving our spam detection systems to keep Strava a trusted space for users. With our upgraded machine learning model, we can better detect and block suspicious activity, so you can share links in the places that matter most.”
It sounds like Strava has improved its AI enough that it can now detect inauthentic content. While it’s very important to safeguard its userbase from bad actors and malicious content, Strava is doubtless hoping its updated machine learning model will make for less upheaval for its users in future as it continues to police the platform.
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