Bot followers

[Terry Jones]

I've recently noticed that I'm picking up Strava followers who I've never heard of and who apparently live in distant countries. These followers give me Kudos very quickly on my rides. It's not all the followers and it's not all the time, but the Kudos arrives extremely quickly.

It reminds me of what happened to Twitter. Once a service becomes popular people start writing bots. At first the bots are simplistic, but then they become a nuisance: tweeting to you, including URLs for products in their tweets, etc. It's also like bots that put inane positive comments on blog posts, with URLs included.

I don't know if this is what's going on with Strava, but that would be my guess. If so, some of the bot authors are likely on this mailing list! :-)

Anyone have any comments? Some of it shouldn't be hard to spot, though these things are usually like biological arms races and it's hard or impossible to "win", only to currently have the upper hand. I don't want to mark myself as private, but OTOH I don't much fancy having an increasing number of bot followers giving me kudos.

It's not so hard to think of worse things that could be done by malicious bots/apps. E.g., even if you have your home location marked as private (i.e., with an exclusion zone), if Strava don't cut rides off in some kind of randomized way, you could figure out fairly accurately where someone lives (especially if they use several approaches to their residence). Even if Strava do randomize the cut-off point of rides that approach the exclusion zone, if you knew or could deduce the pdf of the random variable, you could likely still do a decent job (e.g., use Bayesian inference) of guessing the residence location.

I say all this because I find Strava valuable and I think there are lessons to be learned from what happened to Twittter (and Twitter has had to belatedly address some of them). It would be good to avoid these.  E.g., give users a button to press to indicate that a follower might be a bot.

Terry

[Sam Sandberg]

Terry,

I had the same paranoia for a long time, but I don't think this is actually the work of bots. If it were the case, I'd imagine that some Googling around would produce more "Strava bots" results.

After reading up on some message boards and doing a bit of poking around, I realized that I belong to several large clubs on Strava (for example: https://www.strava.com/clubs/stravaphoto). As it turns out, from the club page you can view recent activity (https://www.strava.com/clubs/102805/recent_activity) and give kudos out like candy.

I'd imagine there are a bunch of people who join large clubs and just sit there all day giving out kudos, and that it probably more often than not results in gaining a large following. It's a bit of a manual process, but it isn't THAT hard, and I'm sure the returns are huge (after all, what are we doing when we're not on our bikes, eh?).

Maybe double check me here - do you belong to some clubs?

If this is indeed the case, I'm not sure how I feel about it all. One one hand, if people really sit there all day and go through the effort to give kudos like that, I guess it's fine. If we don't want the kudos we can always quit the clubs. Strava actually removing the kudos button from the club view recent activity might be a bit drastic/overkill. Perhaps Strava could offer a setting like "no kudos from club view" or something?

Best,

-Sam

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Sam Sandberg


"Where is fancy bred? In the heart or in the head?"
   -Willy Wonka

[Terry Jones]

Hi Sam

Thanks. The thing that made me suspicious is the speed with which things get the kudos. My phone uploads the ride and before I have a chance to edit it to put a title on it, kudos has arrived. I don't know what to think, but the fact that the kudos-givers aren't also making comments (with embedded URLs to products) lends weight to your explanation. You're right, I do belong to some clubs, and a few of them might be large - I haven't really looked. Reloading Strava pages and reflexively giving out kudos sure doesn't burn as many calories as actually going for a ride :-)

Thanks again!

Terry

[Sam Sandberg]

Yeah, I experience the same speedy rando kudos post-ride.

I even commented on one of my stalkers' rides asking how we know each other (his ride had TONS of comments!). The next time he kudos'd me he mentioned that he didn't know me but kudos anyway.

If you wanted to double check my theory, I'd find a rando who gave you kudos and try and see if they're in one of the same clubs you are.

Happy riding

-Sam