a total of 250 electric buses from Chinese manufacturer Yutong [...] the introduction of the new buses is financed through the European Recovery Fund

If it weren't for the Chinese and the EU Commission, the climate battle would have been lost already.

Interesting anecdotes. If signage is what's important, I agree that's an issue, but surely it's separate. What I don't get is why people are sharing (and paying for!) GPX tracks, i.e. to help them with GPS nav, when you all the information you could possibly need is already publicly available.

Perhaps it depends on community but my experience has been pretty uniform: brigading, comment removal, bans, for expressing ideas that (according to opinion polls) are shared by literally most of the population. At first I was a bit shocked, now I know just to avoid politics, it's not worth the trouble. If you've had a difference experience then good for you.

Interesting. So, if they're not on OpenCycleMap (which is pretty dense AFAICT) then basically we're talking "secret routes", that's the added value. That's roughly what I'd guessed. I don't want to question it too much - after all, you say you get value out of it - but to me it feels to me like a bit of a weak proposition. My usual method is much more basic: I look at the satellite view and see where the trees are! Together with standard OSM data this has served me well enough on both foot and wheels.

In fairness there are doubtless international A-list popstars I haven't heard of either! Our culture is becoming so fragmented.

But there's something I don't quite understand about this tracks issue. I get why people want to gamify and socialize their outdoor activity (humans love to compare, after all) but what's the deal with "downloading tracks"? Surely whatever's on OSM or OpenCycleMap is good enough if you want to know where to cycle?

That's fair. BTW what you're describing is known as POSSE.

Try expressing a centrist or - heaven forbid (I haven't actually tried this one) moderate conservative - position on a hot-button subject and see if you still feel that way.

Why not post it here? Or another appropriate community with not much engagement. The (small) audience is already waiting.

An unexpectedly sophisticated take about social media. Consider posting it to [email protected].

I had never even heard of Komoot! My setup for route planning involves a single GPX file, a shell script, a Python script, a P2P file-sharing utility, the monster that is QGIS, and Osmand. It does exactly what I want with no data leakages, it's all open source - and as a solution it's completely unrealistic for anyone but techies.

Just don't try to debate politics unless you already subscribe to the prevailing groupthink. In fairness, that's true of any social-media forum, and the corporate ones have other problems on top.

*sank

But don't worry, this is an example of English grammar changing before our eyes, specifically the collapse of past simple (here, it sank) and past participle (it has sunk). Other examples are rang/rung, sang/sung. Details in John McWhorter's podcast "Lexicon Valley", highly recommended.