Coming across a group of these observations is definitely vexing, for sure, but outside of the City Nature Challenge, when poor quality observations are common, anecdotally I haven’t seen any major uptick in the percentage “poor quality” observations. As iNat has grown, there’s definitely a greater overall number, but many still seem reasonable.
IMO, posting an observation without any ID to it at all is not something to blame the user for. The app itself doesn’t really make it clear that the observer needs to add an ID, and if the observer is out of cell range they literally can’t add an identification. It’s a design issue, and one that will be addressed in the upcoming app in a few ways. It won’t prevent all cases of it, but it should greatly reduce that from happening.
As for poor quality photos, I think that needs to be defined more specifically. If you mean a photo that can be identified past family (and thus be eligible for Research Grade), I think many photos probably meet that criterion. Unfortunately smartphone cameras, which the vast majority of people will be using, are not designed for photographing plants, insects, or birds. Plants don’t scurry away but it’s often really difficult to get proper in-focus shots of them - something I’ve struggled with recently and I’m pretty experienced with photography and generally know which parts of the plant to photograph.
I’d give that feedback, in a civil and constructive manner, of course, to the CNC organizers and maybe to the organizers of specific CNC projects that are particularly problematic. Explain the burden it puts on the community. I think personal stories like that would go a long way. Posting here won’t move the needle any.
Definitely something that I think would be great, but complex to implement.
I agree onboarding should be better, but I’m not sure forum posts are a particularly useful way to gauge the learning curve. A lot of forums and subreddits deal with the same questions over and over again because people don’t search for discussions that have already addressed the question, or they just want to talk to others. iNat also hasn’t had good and findable help resources, and we’re working on that.
iNat is pretty complex, and so are taxonomy and the like. These are just things that take time and experience to learn. I don’t know one would want to throw a lot at people at first, because it will be overwhelming, but I agree there’s currently very little for new users to latch onto.
For what it’s worth, I made a new how-to you can share, for people how want to help refining IDs to observations. I’ll also note that there’s an entire Tutorials section here on the Forum that anyone could make a tutorial for and link to. If you want to recruit people and help them grow as identifiers, it’s something you could use.
You can have text at the ready that explains to people what kind of photos they should take and use a text expander to easily add it as a comment. It won’t fix the existing observation, but it should help people improve their future observations.