I definitely agree that there need to be more restrictions on how the “opted out of community ID” observations are used.
At the very least, there should be some sort of very obvious flag for the opted out observations. For example, put an “opted out” notation in the same place that the “Research Grade” or “Casual” notation would appear.
The problems with the opt-out have been discussed in other posts, including users that opt out of the community ID then get suspended or deactivated, or they just stop using iNat for whatever reason. For some reason, I’ve seen the most incorrect ID’s with users that have been suspended, which is annoying because unless suspensions are temporary, they won’t be correcting their original ID, even if they wanted to.
I have read a few good reasons for opting out of the community ID, but for the most part I’ve seen it misused - either intentionally or by users that don’t understand how it works.
From what I’ve seen, I think incorrectly identified photos will show up in the species photos (i.e., for the yellow faced bumblebee it would be this link: Photos of Yellow-faced Bumble Bee (Bombus vosnesenskii) · iNaturalist Canada)
It also wastes user’s time when they add a fifth or sixth or twentieth correct ID in an attempt to get the title ID correct.