Ha, I was not quiet on the first non-Addiction thread, to the point where the ardent supporters were pissed off enough that I left.
It's crap. There's a psychological barrier where any amount of money (and miss me with the cup of coffee nonsense) changes the nature of the deal. When it's free, I'll put up with a lot of junkiness. As soon as they charge a single dollar, I am no longer a guest but a client, and that changes things. It's similar to how my expectations would change if you let me crash on your couch for a night on a cross-country drive vs if you charged me for it, even a nominal amount. When it's not longer a favor, the entire concept changes. There's a whole fascinating book about research into this called
Predictably Irrational. I also don't trust Strava in the slightest. They ignore bugs forever, break features (like the BT sensor support, not that that's one I care about personally), break third parties intentionally, and generally act like poor digital citizens. Again, that's one thing when they're free, but if I were to pay a single dollar I'd have expectations about their quality and reliability of service that they've never demonstrated an interest in meeting. If they want to be a commercial service, they have to demonstrate professional quality, and I've never seen that out of them. Asking me to pay to enable that is up there with my ex who said "well if you marry me I'll change". I also don't need another social network; I already mostly ignore FB and IG, and completely ignore T. The more resources they pour into that side, the less I want to contribute.
Finally, this puts the stink of death on them - it seems their VC sugar daddies are tightening the purse strings in these pandemic times, and Strava is desperate to make money. If this attempt fails (which it probably will, when you read below) they'll either fail or have to be yet more draconian to try to convert free into paid users.
This article sums it up even better:
https://medium.com/@cosmocatalano/on...k-b6928d6e8b5b