This seems to be converging with another recent thread (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/issue-with-users-automatically-agreeing-to-an-identification/2987/48).
I’m fairly new to iNat, but I’ve been trying to ID a fair bit in my area of expertise. I have to say it does irritate me when an observer, who clearly had no idea about an ID, quickly agrees with me at species or subspecies level. A number of people in this thread have explained how they do their own checking before agreeing with someone else’s ID of their observation. I do the same, but I really think we’re in a minority. Simply looking at the speed with which many observers agree with my ID tells me they can’t possibly have had time to do any checking themselves. As we all know, the end result is that we end up with a lot of RG obs that have only one ‘reliable’ ID (and if that’s wrong…). That potentially degrades the dataset, and in effect defeats the purpose of the requirement for two IDs to reach RG.
In the other thread, requiring 3 IDs for RG was suggested as a remedy, but didn’t seem to be favoured by many (it wouldn’t be a problem for bird IDs for example, but for groups with few experts it probably would). Removing the Agree button for new users was also suggested, but I don’t think that would solve the problem—it’s very quick to type in enough of the suggested ID to make it come up.
I suggested stopping an observer who had entered an initial ID from changing that ID later (for that obs only), effectively preventing them from agreeing blindly with the next ID provided (see the other thread for a few more details). That didn’t go down well with the frequent users who, it seems, routinely upload obs with no ID or high-level IDs, and come back later to ID them.
This seems to be another argument for the ability to load obs in ‘draft mode’, then ID/edit/add to them if you want to before they go live. If that could happen, stopping people from changing their initial ID could be implemented, and the frequent users could still change their own IDs in draft mode. I suspect many of us would like the dataset to be more robust, and perhaps this would help. And who knows, realising that they can’t change an ID later may even make some observers spend a little more time on deciding their initial ID.