The forum was never intended to be used for the discussion of incorrectly identified observations. From " About the General category - please read before posting!"
The iNat Forum is also not a place to seek help with identification, promote projects, or to post unconstructive complaints/grievances.
I do appreciate your walkthrough of a typical user experience. It is true that identifying trees on iNaturalist can be difficult, especially for someone who is not well versed in plant ID or taxonomy, and this often results in users posting observations with overly broad IDs or incorrect species level IDs. However, when complaining about how difficult the system is, you have to compare it to the alternative. iNaturalist is complicated because identifying plants is inherently complicated, not because iNaturalist is bad at identifying plants. iNaturalist is better at identifying plants than any free plant ID app on the market, and it comes with the ability to ID many other types of organisms and it comes with a team of volunteers who correct the computer vision, something no other platform offers. Additionally, without an App, the new user would have to find a local plant identification book or a similar resource in order to have any hope of identification, which takes substantially more time and effort (and is substantially more prone to error).
this would explain why there are so many wrongly id’d trees on inat.
You may not be familiar with the data on this topic, so here’s some info that should change your mind. Well over 90% of the plants on iNaturalist are identified correctly. For context, iNaturalist is slightly more accurate than herbaria records (at least in well-studied regions). I’m sure you’re aware that herbaria are often considered the gold standard of botanical accuracy. In other words, if iNaturalist has too many incorrect IDs, then literally no resource on earth meets your standard, and you may be best off with your previously referenced plan:
i save up my pennies and start a site basically just like inat, but it’s a market. my creation would destroy inat. well, this is how evolution works. kinda.
again, there’s absolutely no shame in making mistakes. but setting people up for failure is a different story.
iNaturalist is not setting anyone up for failure just because it does not necessarily get inexperienced users to the correct answer every time. That’s like saying that a ladder is setting someone up for failure because it’s not a teleporter. iNaturalist is much better than any alternative, and the “solution” you’re describing is technically impossible as “tree” is not a taxonomic rank.