Despite not knowing any professional entymologists (I wish I did, I have so much I want to discuss!), this post speaks to me. I first picked up iNat in 2013 when I was still in middle school. At the time I wanted a place to upload my recordings of singing Orthoptera (crickets, etc.), and my favorite sound platform, Xeno-Canto, was then limited to birds at the time. I also wanted a place to discuss the IDs of mystery Orthoptera I had recorded, and iNat seemed like the best fit. So I used it for a while, and there was some good discussion, but I lamented that the Xeno-Canto forums for mystery recordings were much more active. Understandable, since Orthoptera is a niche interest, and iNat wasn’t even an app in 2013, I don’t think.
Over the years I drifted away, came back occasionally, found that the site was somewhat harder for me to use as a blind person since it was more feature-rich, and I didn’t really concern myself with it. That is until I was required to use iNat for a college course in 2020. You still couldn’t record sounds in the iOS app at that point, so I did more with Xeno-Canto instead. But still, I noted its growing prominence and my main gripe, besides a selfish wish for more vigorous discussion on my niche taxa, was accessibility.
A friend of mine then brought my focus back here and I discovered the plethora of sound observations on here now. I love looking through and identifying things for people, but because the Identify Mode and graphic search features are completely inaccessible, and because people sometimes just don’t know how to record sounds well, or don’t leave notes describing what they want identified, the process can get a bit laborious for me. My point is, these are my criticisms of iNat. Fix the inaccessible website. Let blind people take advantage of the features sighted people take for granted. Publish a tutorial for recording and describing sounds that people won’t miss when they upload. Perhaps even make it easier for people interested in certain taxa to find each other. But these are just things that can be remedied. They are not at all indictments of iNat as a platform. To be honest, I still prefer Xeno-Canto for archival purposes and (anecdotally) higher data quality, though of a more limited scope. But I view XC and iNat as serving somewhat different purposes, so this really isn’t a problem as long as we take that into account. So yes, I get very annoyed with iNat sometimes, and I can be pretty vocal about it. But I’m certainly not a naysayer.