Hey @bazwal. iNat is a pretty friendly community. I think we can kick around ideas here without taking this personally.
My experience of IDing a whole lot of observations is that for every user who has chosen to opt-out of Community ID with clear knowledge of the implications, there are many more who didn’t realize the effect of enabling this option. Realistically, a user would need to have accumulated a fair bit of time using iNat in order to understand the concept of Community ID, and yet quite a lot of the “opt-outs” are from people who have very few observations. Many of those users haven’t been active in a while.
Someone making an informed choice to opt-out of Community ID is essentially saying “I’m confident in my identification of this organism (or all my IDs) and I don’t want that changed based on the consensus of other iNat users.” That’s fine, but it’s logically not compatible with “I didn’t know what this was so I used computer vision to tell me.”
As some have pointed out, the way the UI works means that it’s possible that a knowledgeable user who’s opposed to Community ID may have used computer vision to select the ID that they don’t want changed. To me this seems like something of an edge case. It’s also clear that, if iNat were to implement logic that suppressed the opt-out for computer vision IDs, this hypothetical observer has any easy option of editing the ID, pressing a key, pressing backspace and clicking Save.
For every opt-out aficionado who might occasionally experience mild inconvenience, there will be many novice users whose observations get accurately IDed more quickly and don’t have to scratch their heads wondering why the suggested IDs don’t change the overall ID listed for their observations. Also, among orphaned observations, there will also be a significantly lower proportion that have incorrect IDs that will never be fixed. That’s a secondary aim of iNat, but still a valuable one.
To my mind, someone who wants to opt-out of community ID should be able to do that when they affirmatively provide their own ID. But setting up iNat to prioritize computer vision IDs over community knowledge isn’t helping anyone.