Description of need:
With inspiration from @DianaStuder’s comment here, iNat should add a symbol next to new user’s usernames similar to how the forum has a banner or how Discord puts a little flower symbol next to new users in servers. Adding a little symbol would show other users who’s new and we can welcome them to the iNat community, similar to what happens here on the forum
Feature request details:
iNat could add a little symbol (such as the green dot in my example below) that could stay next to the user’s username for a certain period of time, maybe a week or so.
Kind of related, at least to the “metric we can see” part…does anyone know why some people’s observation numbers don’t show next to their names in Identify?
It seems like it might be associated with the date/location being obscured (at least, this and the other example I found quickly were obscured), but I don’t see why that would also make obscuring the number of the observer’s observations necessary or desirable.
EDIT: Especially since the observer’s observation count is still visible if you click through to their profile. It’s just cumulatively annoying to need to do that
The annoyingness is the point, this provides just a little bit of a barrier to one of the easiest ways of finding the location of obscured observations.
The number is always a clickable link to their most recent observations (which could include the obscured one along with unobscured ones at the same location). I suppose the number could be included without a link.
I’ve been correcting people’s untouched DQA that have been around for years, and sometimes I downrank a good portion of their observations to Casual despite their age. However, almost all the individuals I have to talk about DQA with have accounts less than two months old.
Personally, I don’t think this is really necessary or useful.
That information is already there if you really want to know, just click on their name and go to their profile.
Markers like this can be abused and I’m not at all interested in how long someone has been on the platform, I’m interested in the quality of their contributions, which, unfortunately, is often not linked to whether they are a new or established user.
I agree that I’m interested in the quality of people’s contributions and that it’s not linked to whether they’re a new user or not, but I do feel that a marker could be useful in pointing out people who might be open to improving their contribution quality, rather than those who’ve showed they don’t care.
Maybe at some point, in addition to a Data Quality Assessment, there will be an automated User Quality Assessment. Something like a social credit score. E.g. this user:
Eh, I don’t always respond to comments or DMs and I think scoring users on whether they do or not would create an expectation that we are supposed to respond to everything. But not everything requires a response, nor should users feel like they are required to respond to unsolicited messages that are irrelevant to them.
I like this idea in concept. It takes a significant amount of my identification work method in each cycle (one cycle = a time I review an observation to ID it) to open a user’s profile and check if they’re new. I was planning on providing a link to additional onboarding resources to users less than a month old the first time I ID for them, and it’s annoying to check user’s account age through the ID page. I always want to be the most welcoming to new users and make iNaturalist a better place for evidence collection and preprocessing so that we can get naturalists to stay and continue providing observations needed for research, and it’s a lot easier to help a new user get onboarded properly if I can see a marker saying that they’re new.
There is also potential to abuse this feature. A lot of new users are minors or young adults because they know how to use the tools of the Internet better, on average, than older adults. However, as a near-victim of Internet grooming (don’t ask), I recognize the potential for shady actors to look at new users’ “NEW” markers, judge them to be easily manipulable given the information in their profile, and begin the grooming process. The marker would probably have an insignificant effect on grooming compared to before because kids don’t often use the main app and are more vulnerable on other social media.
However, new users are sometimes better at using iNaturalist (understanding when to apply DQA, responding when asked to do something reasonable, editing and uploading observations so they are easier to identify and more accurate), etc. as was explained in an above comment.
The social credit idea is cool, but not everyone values the same social values as others. I personally like it when people are direct to me and don’t use figurative language when trying to get me to change something about my observations or identifications, and I don’t value participation in certain aspects of iNat as much (example: users that journal on iNat a lot are cool and are doing good work, but journaling does not necessarily make them more favorable to me). If this was a thing it should probably be best implemented as a browser extension rather than a native feature.
