As someone who does not care for gamification or leaderboards, I want to express my concern that this change will have major negative impacts for that minority of iNat users who actively work to ID observations.
iNat staff have already acknowledged that engaging users to assist with IDs is an ongoing challenge. While I understand the motivation behind the change, I fear that an attempt to address the relatively minor issue of people piling on IDs will cause many productive identifiers to scale back their contributions to iNat.
iNat identifiers have a range of interests and focuses. In general, though, most people choose to identify organisms within a particular taxon and geographic area. As people build specialist knowledge (or bring it from their prior study), a significant factor for continued engagement is the ability to “curate” a particular taxonomic area. Users can apply their knowledge to improving the quality of identifications across a species group, genus or family and see those results in the form of more precise distribution data, more accurate computer vision training, better educated fellow iNat users and so on.
One technique that identifiers use to build this quality is to review existing observations and provide confirming or diverging IDs using their own experience, field guides, dichotomous keys, etc. In iNat this might be accomplished in the Identify tool by selecting a parent taxon (and maybe a geography) and including all observations (Needs ID, RG and Casual). Until now, the identifier could then navigate through these observations, choosing to Agree or add a new Identification as appropriate. The end result of this is that the identifier has made an identification for every observation of that taxon that they can confidently ID.
As an identifier, the new agree functionality prevents me from using this workflow. I can no longer agree to the ID for any observation that is already at RG status. All I can do is ignore it, mark it Reviewed, or manually add a confirming identification. It might appear that checking Reviewed achieves much the same result as clicking Agree, but that falls short in several ways:
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When I look at some observation later, I no longer get an active confirmation that I concurred with the ID. I can’t tell whether my Reviewed checkbox means “I agree with this ID” or “I really don’t know but I want to stop seeing this” or “I pressed the ‘R’ key by mistake”.
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Other iNat users don’t know whether a particular identifier has reviewed an RG observation or not. Consider insects or spiders, taxons that are notoriously difficult to accurately ID to species level. I wouldn’t put much credence in the identity of an RG observation whose ID is based on the observer’s initial computer vision ID plus a confirming ID from a new iNat user who was part of the same bioblitz. If those two IDs are supported by an ID from a knowledgeable expert in the taxon, my confidence would be much higher. The new functionality means I cannot tell whether the ID has been reviewed and explicitly confirmed by an experienced identifier or not reviewed at all.
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I can rely less on any searches or reporting I might do looking for my own username or someone else’s as the identifier. In the past, I could assume that a search for observations identified by a particular user would tell me which ones that person had reviewed. Now, the search will exclude an unknown number of additional observations that they reviewed but didn’t ID because they were already at RG status.
I’m aware that I can still manually add an identification that confirms the current ID. Realistically, I can’t see myself doing that very often. I’ve reviewed 20,000 plant observations in California and western states over the past year because the Identify tool gave me a really efficient way to apply and build my knowledge and see the results. I can tell that I have concurred with or dissented from the ID for every observation of a particular taxon. For the next 20,000 observations the only way I can continue to do that is to type in a species name 18,000+ times. That’s quite a disincentive.