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Saw the recent note about streamlining segments by only keeping the most popular ones, detecting and removing fake attempts, etc. That's great. That said, I would say that one reason why some people make duplicates is an attempt to make a better spatial representation of the route so that anyone taking shortcuts will not have their attempt registered. In making this update to segments, I highly recommend strava update the GPS match precision required for a segment to register.

As an example, take the Black Widow trail in San Diego, CA, black mountain area. The trail starts with a few switchbacks but there is also a steep hiking trail straight up the middle. Some bombers with their DH bikes send it straight down this trail, but their rides are registered into the segment with all the switchbacks. As a result all of the top attempts for the Black Widow trail are from DHers skipping all the switchbacks because the GPS registration is too forgiving. I am hoping a change could remedy this.

I agree with that. A number of times I created a new segment to represent a trail rerouting or just make a new segment a better quality than the old segment - with a much better GPS quality, more accurate distance and elevation data, etc. GPS devices have improved so much in the last few years with availability of dual-band GPS. The problems is that my new segments, even though they have much better GPS quality, would obviously have less popularity than already established segments, so they would likely be hidden for most users and lose competition, and be eliminated as duplicates. 

Going forward, how are we going to improve already existing segments?

Same thing with people who stop short of the end of a segment, then shave 10s off their time. A lot of times it’s not even intentional—it may happen on trails that have multiple junctions, where people simply turn off before the end of the segment. However, this can make it very difficult to create reliable segments in city parks.

Strava needs to be much more stringent on how close you start to the segment’s start, and how close you finish to the segment’s end. I’ve seen people match a segment despite stopping more 100’ short.

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