A better range of incentives

I think it could go further-- there's so many interesting data points available. How have you progressed on X segment, and show the times, times of day, temp outside and equipment used (bike/shoes etc). I would be so interested to dig in to why sometimes i can blast up hills and sometimes i just sont have it.

This is super interesting. I like the idea of breaking it down more or differently  I agree the KOMs and stuff don't motivate me too much ad I'm not a power athlete and there actually aren't many segments around me. I don't know that I would want the world to know my percentages of improving but I really like the idea of temperatures and times of day.

I like this idea as it incentivises people to improve against themselves. There should be things like the your fastest 1k, 5k, etc this month/year and it shouldn't matter if you ran 3k, 6k, 9k or 21k, it should find the best time for the distance within. ie you might do a few mins warm up on a 3k but then leg it for 1 mile and slow down again. Like you say then you can say things like your fastest 5k time this month is 5% faster than last month! The flip side is you will also get, your 5k is 30% slower than last month 😉 😉 It's like the Garmin status "unproductive" when you go for a slower run, not great motivation!

@Amritt and others... that's a very interesting idea! But as you mentioned, there is SO much data available. I don't think it would be realistic for strava to implement a lot of it all at once. So exactly what one thing would you try first if you had to pick one?

I feel like they already have a lot of good stuff built in to compete against yourself. For example, I can click on any segment and at a glance see a plot graph of ALL of my times for that segment (some of which I have ridden hundreds of times). 

I love the idea, I just think we need to refine it more before getting it onto the Feature Suggestion board for consideration. 

I'm aware of ways to compare myself to myself, but the limitation is in ways to compare with others. So for me the incentive to improve is the biggest thing - a leader board showing best segment improvement either as percentage of previous time or more simply by time would encourage all riders to try and improve their time however fast or slow they are. I would want to encourage someone who is 8000 on the current KOM leader board but who improves their time by 15% to be very high up on the improvement leader board, bearing in mind that the top time performers are likely making very small improvements. I also think having this as a monthly or annual leaderboard as someone else noted would keep it fresh and incentivise everyone.

So in summary - a time-framed percentage improvement segment leader board.