When you’re a new user, people swarm over your observations like flies around a corpse. But a while later, after you’ve been on iNaturalist for a while, you find that less people are identifying your observations, and a lot of them are needs id.
It’s just kind of sad. That’s happened to a lot of us, I bet.
No? Are you including new observations when you say this, or are you only talking about the first observations posted?
I totally feel your frustration, I like to use Classic iNat app. However, the classic app does not allow you to view another user’s profile and it does not allow you to see the people leading in observations of whatever Taxon. When observations were left on “needs ID” I went on the desktop and started tagging the folks who are on the leader board. Connecting with them through tagging them also informed me on better ways in which I could make IDs for others to identify.
Not to be like “I haven’t experienced this, so it must not be happening”, but I don’t think iNaturalist really works that way. Recent observations are typically more likely to be ID’d because they aren’t buried under thousands of others that were posted weeks, months, or years ago. Unless an ID’er goes out of their way to sort through older observations.
As an identifier, I rarely pay attention to accounts, if at all, when ID’ing their observations; recent joiner or not. As an observer, I find that my observations get ID’d as fast as ever, unless they’re a difficult-to-ID photo or a more obscure taxon.
Is it possible there’s a different circumstance that could be causing your observations to be less viewed? Potentially, like uploading from a less well-studied area (fewer iNatters or experts in that field), or you’re now uploading less “popular” or more obscure taxa?
can’t say I’ve experienced this, but my observations are over 90% arthropods so I never expect much action
photograph more birds, i guess
I don’t see why there would be a decline based on how long you’ve been using iNat. As already mentioned, IDers don’t pay attention to how new an iNatter is. Perhaps you’re posting more difficult taxa now than you were at first? Submit some bird obs, they’ll be IDed in minutes (usually).
Added: I see you’ve posted a lot of arthropods, plants, and fungi. All take time to be IDed and some simply won’t be. Consider cropping some of your pics of small organisms to make them easier to see.
Identify allows you to filter to new accounts, and I know some number of identifiers spend time explicitly identifying those, so I don’t think there is no effect at all (it could even come down to a single prolific local identifier regularly doing this). There is also the program Martyn mentioned.
But yes, some taxa are just very difficult or neglected and that’s probably the single biggest factor
I do use the filter for Accounts Created in the Last Week.
When I realised I hadn’t a hope in h*** of keeping up with all the obs in my preferred locations.
I decided it is better for me to support and encourage newbies. We each need to make IDs, if, we want to GET IDs.
For example I wanted to ID for Africa, beyond my observose South Africa.
For Newbies I have 30 waiting for me today.
If I remove that filter, there are only 19K … I despair … and that is why I use the filter.
PS you don’t have a link to your iNat profile here on the Forum, and I’m sorry, but your chosen name is difficult to remember with the correct punctuation. iNat doesn’t forgive if I forget whether you used - or _
PPS thanks to @phma I have found our purrson 
This is unfortunately simply part of the site. More observations that need ID’s than people have capacity for, and people are more likely to ID more recent observations.
Also, with all the love in the world, you’ve been on this site for all of two months. Community science takes time and expertise! It’s sad to see your observations not be research grade, but unless you’re posting only monarchs and canada geese, it’s going to happen
Would be nice if more forum users would include a link to their iNat site, especially if they are asking for assistance.
I haven’t come across this phenomenon. Yes, for sure, people are more likely to ID new observations; but I’m not sure how being a new user would make a difference. Maybe you just got particularly lucky in your first days on the site? Has anything changed about the kind of observations you upload now compared to your first ones? (If, just as an example, you uploaded a few birds when you were new, and then recently you added a few beetles, that alone would explain it – the simple fact that birds attract orders of magnitude more interest from identifiers than insects do.)
To me it looks like your observations are being identified at a fairly reasonable rate. I believe you when you say it feels like no one is identifying your observations any more, but is it possible that’s just because the initial excitement has worn off for you?
Even if you are getting fewer identifications than when you first started, my advice is the same: Pick something that you really really really want to identify, and see if you can learn to make that ID yourself. Then, identify it for others–at least, ID the easy ones!
If you repeat this every time you feel frustrated, pretty soon, you will have so much to ID for other people that you won’t have time to notice whether your observations are getting IDs or not. And, in the process, you also will start to come across people who are identifying for those taxa, so not only will you know who to tag when you need help, but also, waiting will feel less frustrating because you can see there are people doing the work.
All observations. When I post new ones, only about 1 out of every 6-10 observations get identifications.
Occasionally, old ones are revisited, but that’s rare.
A two-month-old observation is not old. I’ve had observations get IDs years later.
I feel kinda guilty ever posting this topic, because after I posted it, somebody has been going through my observations. Note: I just don’t like being specific at certain times. I’m not being mean by using “somebody” instead of their name.*
Maybe it’s because there aren’t as many users. I mean, every single observation from about a few years after iNat was created is research grade. Then the number of research grade observations slowly declined. Or maybe some people just care about their own observations.
Yes, because those older obs have been around a long time and there were fewer of them in the past. So they’ve made RG, maybe not right away but eventually. There are a lot more observers and proportionately fewer IDers today.
You’re not alone cat purrson- I’ve noticed this too. I thought it was just me! I’m actually glad someone else seems to be aware of this phenomenon, lol.
