Why We Love E-bikes on Strava

The poor integration of e-bikers is leading to quite a few of us still competitive normal bikers getting disenfranchised with Strava and its value. We used to enjoy hunting out the top 10 on our local MTB rides but now its just a sad waste of time as almost all the leaderboards for MTB climbs are full of e-bikers.

Occasionally someone will take an interest and purge out as many e-bikers as they can using the flag function but Strava restricts this to around 5 flags then locks it so we gave up flagging the rides as well

so the question is do we continue our subscription?

do we even bother with Strava?  I guess it's become a bit of a social connection/media thing with photos and all so that might keep it alive but not the cups and Koms anyway. That's dead now.  Leaderboards etc are becoming worthless. 

And it's all due to lazy e-bikers not bothering to use the e-bike setting.  

Sad.

"do we even bother with Strava?"

Given the advances in Garmin and other sport watches and given a KOM or QOM is out of the reach of 99.99% of Strava users, I'd say the answer is no. Strava needs a re-think. It was great 10 or more years ago but it's a bit tired now and there's huge amounts of really useful training information available from other sources.

I have no problem with e-bikes, My girlfriend has 3 of them, she also has 2 total knee replacements. The bring riding into reach for many who would otherwise be left out. I do have a problem when I lose my KOM on a segment with a 13% grade to an e-bike. There are a lot of e-bike riders on this thread who are calling those of us who are losing KOMs elitist or ablest but I'm sorry, I'm 62 years old and have spent 30 years developing my strength and skill, That said there is no way that a pro level rider can compete with the current crop of e-bikes on a climb. This renders the leader-boards completely useless. E-bike vs conventional bike, completely unfair, 250W ebike vs 750W e-bike, completely unfair. The leader boards should be for conventional bikes and e-bikes should have their own boards. The current leader-boards have gender and age categories and the ebike leader-boards should have power and class categories but the two should not be shown together.  Strava began 15 years ago and has steadily added features over that time. E-bikes came into their own several years ago so to expect that strava would have had time to implement all the same features for them in such a short time frame is unrealistic. There are tools available for the e-bike riders to flag their bikes as E-bikes and that excludes them from the regular leader-boards. Some e-bike riders are using those tools, others are not. I like others have begun to question the value of a paid subscription so that I can have my efforts wiped out by a 10 year old on an e-bike. I recently lost one of my KOMs to a rider with 2 rides on strava, one of those rides was named "Range Test". 

Strava has long deleted rides from leader-boards that were doctored by software that increased the speed. If e-bikes are allowed to share the regular leader-boards then as a 62 year old should I be allowed to use said software to handicap my ride speeds by say 10%. Sharing the leader-boards is like racing a go-cart heads-up against a Ferrari. 

I agree with many of the bike riders on Strava regarding E-bikes and leaderboards.  I've come to the point when viewing some of my friends rides (Who are E-bikers) getting QOM's and KOM's and trophies when I know they ride an E-bike.  And like ponley, I am a 72 year old female with one knee replacement and the other needing one; I work hard to be strong and fast.  Not to diminish the efforts of an E-bike rider.  They SHOULD have their own Leaderboard and Strava should work to create the things they have requested regarding segments. And why limit how many times we can flag known cheaters?  It's clear if they are riding the speed of a pro at 60, 70, etc. it's cheating.  Stop being lazy Strava, it's not rocket science. It's simple programing.  I am a paid subscriber.

@ddcb EBikers have their own leaderboards since 10 years. Additionally to flagging activities you could comment the activities of people to get them to change the activity type and if that doesn't help you could report them to Strava.

Thank you.  That was unclear to me.  I just don't understand why some don't use their own leaderboard.  When I get booted off a QOM or loose a trophy place and it's someone I know rides an E-bike it's a little perturbing.  

There are a number of things that strava COULD do but they are too busy adding bling to the app. For instance, a member is limited to flagging 5 rides, How about when a rider flags a ride for incorrect activity type strava moves ALL that riders activities to the correct type. If the rider rides both e-bike and regular bike it is the offending rider that must get his/her regular bike rides reclassified. By simply shifting the effort to the offending rider you would effectively provide the motivation to properly classify ones rides correctly in the first place. That would require effort on strava's part though, why bother when you can get the riders to do all the work for you.

Note to strava, I was a paid subscriber, the only reason was the leaderboards but with you having made them useless by this very issue I am no longer a subscriber.

If Strava really loves e-bikes as this post claims, they wouldn’t treat them like the unwanted relative that shows up uninvited for a holiday dinner. Strava doesn’t love e-bikes, they barely tolerate them. The most glaring example of this attitude is that e-bike miles don’t count toward the annual riding goal. I just did an e-bike ride this afternoon in the cold and wind. I was pushing hard, well, hard for me anyway. My quads are sore, but my mind is happy. Do the miles count towards my annual goal? Nope. I can sit on my indoor trainer, nice and comfy, cruising along in Z2, and those miles count. The only explanation I can come up with is an inherent prejudice against e-bikes.