There are a few things we could do to help orient people, which would solve this and many other symptoms. Many other community-based websites do this already:
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New user orientation: Any time a user first logs into the app or website, it takes them through a brief tutorial. It could be dismissed or postponed, if they want to play around on their own first, but have it start as the default. Clearly state the mission of iNat, explain the key features, plug the website or app, give some best practices.
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Buddy System: Round up a corps of experienced users. New users get assigned a buddy, who welcomes them to the site and offers to answer any questions. I try to do this in my region as a retention effort to let people know there are other users nearby interested in their work and willing to help, but it could be formalized. I’ve written about this before, but for the first several months as a user, I made posts, but didn’t know if there were any other active users in the state. The first time someone went through and worked on identifying my posts, it felt like magic. It wasn’t until I found the ‘Explore’ function and filtered my state with grid view that I realized I could see the feed of posts for my state. I might not have stuck around if I was just wandering around clicking random posts on the map view!
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Badges: I love the badge idea mentioned by @sullivanribbit ! Badge for going through the tutorial, exploring features, making their first post, 10th post, 100th post, and same for identifications, comments, etc. to encourage people to check it all out and be an active community member. Heck, our forum does some of this stuff, but the main program doesn’t. I know some of those features are incorporated into some of the other apps that interact with the iNat database, but I don’t think badges make iNat less credible or “serious”.
Probably all of these have been mentioned elsewhere, but feel free to put any of these formally in the Feature Request pile. :D