Do Strava Kudos Actually Motivate You? The Science of Social Rewards

Every rider who records on Strava has felt it: you finish a grim, wet, forty-minute ride, upload it, and a few minutes later two friends have tapped the thumb. It should not matter. It is the smallest reward in sport. And yet, a lot of the time, it does.

This is the pillar article for our external motivators cluster — kudos, streaks, badges and leaderboards. It starts with the simplest of them because it is the one with the clearest evidence.

Do kudos actually make you ride more?

The best direct evidence comes from a study of Strava itself. Rob Franken, Hidde Bekhuis and Jochem Tolsma, sociologists at Radboud University in the Netherlands, followed the Strava activity of 329 members of five running clubs for a year. The clubs were online extensions of real clubs, so most members knew each other off the app. Their paper, Kudos make you run!, was published in the journal Social Networks in 2023.

Two findings stand out:

• Runners who received more kudos went on to run more. The relationship held over time, not just at a single snapshot.
• Influence flowed upward. Less active runners tended to move towards the behaviour of more active friends, more than the other way round. People used their peers as a benchmark.

The honest limits matter too. This was a longitudinal network study, not a randomised experiment, and the sample was runners rather than cyclists. It shows that kudos and subsequent training move together in a way that is hard to explain by coincidence. It does not prove that kudos are the active ingredient on their own. A separate 2022 paper by the same team found that runners whose number of training partners grew also ran more sessions per week — which suggests the people matter at least as much as the button.

Why would a tap on a screen work at all?

In our piece on why riders lose motivation we used self-determination theory, from Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, to describe three inputs motivation depends on: autonomy, competence and relatedness. Kudos touch two of them.

• Relatedness: kudos are proof that someone noticed. For a rider who trains alone, that is often the only witness the ride gets.
• Competence: kudos on a hard effort are a small signal that the effort registered as an achievement, not just an entry in a log.

There is also a reason this kind of reward is safer than most. A 1999 meta-analysis by Deci, Richard Koestner and Ryan pooled over a hundred experiments on rewards and intrinsic motivation. Tangible rewards that people expected for doing a task tended to reduce their later interest in it. Positive verbal feedback tended to increase it. The distinction their theory draws is between rewards that feel controlling — "I am doing this to get paid" — and rewards that feel informational — "this tells me I did well."

A kudos from a friend is about as informational as a reward gets. It costs nothing, promises nothing and arrives after the fact. That is why it can work without hollowing out the reason you ride.

When do kudos backfire?

Informational rewards can become controlling ones. The shift is gradual and easy to miss. Watch for these patterns:

1. You shape the ride for the post. The route is chosen for the map it draws, the distance is rounded up to look good, the easy recovery ride goes unrecorded because it looks weak. The reward has started choosing your training.
2. A quiet upload feels like a failed ride. If a ride that got no reaction feels worse than the same ride with ten kudos, the reaction is doing the job your own reasons used to do.
3. Comparison turns into pressure. The upward benchmarking that Franken's team found can motivate — or, for a rider who is behind, become a weekly reminder of being behind.
4. Kudos come mainly from strangers. A large following produces more taps and less information. The reward inflates and stops meaning anything.

The underlying risk is the overjustification effect, first shown by Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett in 1973: children who already liked drawing drew less after being given an expected reward for it. The reward replaced the reason. A rider who only rides when someone will see it is on the same path.

How do kudos compare with streaks, badges and leaderboards?

Kudos are the gentlest external motivator in a typical cycling app. The others are stronger, riskier, or both.

We will cover streaks and leaderboards in their own articles. For now the pattern is enough: the motivators that work longest are the ones that come from people who know you and that reward what you actually did, not what you can be ranked on.

How should you use kudos so they keep working?

You cannot control who taps your rides, but you can control how much weight the taps carry and where they come from.

1. Shrink the audience that matters. Notice whose kudos you care about. It is usually five or six people. Make sure they can see your rides, and stop counting the rest.
2. Record the boring rides too. An easy spin that gets no reaction is still a ride. Logging it keeps the record honest and keeps the reward from editing your training.
3. Give kudos for consistency, not just size. The third ride of the week, a return after a fortnight off, an early start in bad weather. These are the behaviours that keep people riding, so they are the ones worth reinforcing in others.
4. Pair the tap with a word occasionally. "Good to see you back out" is more informational than a thumb, and far more memorable.
5. Check the reason once a month. Ask: would I still have done that ride if nobody could see it? If the answer drifts towards no, take a week off posting, not off riding.

Where Pruvi fits

We built Pruvi around the conditions the research says make social rewards work: small groups of people who know each other, where contribution is visible and an absence is noticed. Weekly team competition gives encouragement a reason and a target — the ride that keeps your team in it — rather than rewarding whatever looks biggest in a feed. It sits alongside Strava rather than replacing it; how the two compare is in our Strava, Pruvi and the rest breakdown.

Kudos are worth having. They are just not a plan. Treat them as a small, honest signal from people who know you, and keep the reason you ride somewhere a feed cannot reach it.