There are many related threads, but all I found are closed.
I am overwhelmed with notifications. I consider all notifications with non-disagreeing IDs as noise (for me) and the signal to noise ratio is just too low. Going through that list is just extremely boring work. I decided today that I am not willing to do that anymore.
Unfortunately this will make me a worse iNat citizen. I won’t respond to mentions anymore because I won’t see them. I won’t correct my mistakes anymore, because I won’t see them (unless someone sends a personal message - you are welcome to do so).
To be clear: I don’t want this to come across as rage quitting. (Not the least because I am not quitting! :-) ) I work in software development and I know that prioritising feature requests in a world of limited resources is hard. And I have no clue how many things the iNat team has to juggle. So this is just a personal decision for me. If the iNat dev team sees is as another data point showing the rigidity of the notification process is not just a minor inconvenience (at least for some), all the better.
Click your profile icon > account settings > notification settings. You can disable the type of notifications you don’t want to see, to filter out the noise so you don’t miss the types of notifications you actually care about
We are approaching iNat’s July to December goals. Notification management on THAT list ??
I know of one profile which states - I have left iNat because we cannot manage notifications. They were active and I still come across ID activity and obs from them all these years later.
You have my sympathy! I tried turning off some notifications as people suggested above and I quickly found I very much missed seeing if people agreed with my IDs of my own observations, particularly where I wasn’t completely sure of that initial ID.
So now I get hundreds of notifications a day and, frankly, I only look at the notifications of mentions, comments, and what identifiers think of my own observations. If someone disagrees with my IDs for other people - and I make a lot of those IDs - I don’t see those disagrees until the observations become Mavericks.
Do I feel guilty about such “bad” behavior? Not really. I’m vaguely aware some kind soul has created a tool for managing one’s notifications, but I haven’t looked into it. I suppose I’m valuing quantity (of IDs and observations) over quality, but so far, my percentage of Mavericks is far below 1% of the IDs I make (at least, I think so; I can’t figure out how to find out that number). I’m OK with that level of mistakes.
This is also my normal practice, though I tend to hover over notifications to see the current ID, then if something is at a higher level than I expect, I check to see if that’s because someone has disagreed. A personal way of filtering I guess.
Oh, thanks to your post I just realised it’s not hard to search for ‘mentioned’ in the notification list. So I can look at those efficiently - will do that, meanig my ignoring will be less severe.
I sympathize! I’ve been ignoring notifications a lot recently. The suggestions for reducing what you see may help! But if ignoring them all is what you have to do right now, do it and don’t worry about it.
So turn off confirming/non-disagreeing ID notifications in your iNat settings. That seems like a much better solution than getting overwhelmed and ignoring all notifications.
To all the people saying change the settings: you cannot turn off all non-disagreeing notifications in settings. You can turn off notifications of exact agreements (you and I both say it’s species A) or subspecies refinements (I say it’s species A and you say it’s species A subspecies B) but you can’t turn off refinements in general. So if I said this is genus C and then you came along and put genus C species A, I get a notification even though you didn’t disagree with me.
My methods to avoid being overwhelmed by notifications: I have the same notification settings as you. I immediately unfollow observations that I have left a high level ID for that I don’t intend to try to ID further. I look at my notifications on the app because they don’t disappear there. However you probably still get way more notifications because you do more IDs than me. I average about 20 per day whereas your average is around 125 per day. https://jumear.github.io/stirfry/iNat_identifier_stats.html?user_id=richyfourtytwo
Good to know, I’ll send you messages going forward.
I receive a lot of notifications too. I don’t look at most. What I do is press ctrl + f and search “comment” and “mention”. This highlights all the instances of those words in my notification list. These are really the only notifications I have interest in.
If you work on a computer too, you could try this trick out.
I do really wish there was an option to turn off identifications for observations that arent your own, but keep agreeing and other IDs on your own observations on. I like to go through my own confirmations but I dont want to sort through a ton of other “agreeing” identifications on other peoples observations I have identified. I would be much more motivated to identify other peoples observations if we had this option.
Agree, I like to do the unknown sorting but Im not invested into what it actually is. But I do want minutia updates on the ones I have uploaded to figure out.
But if you ID for others, or sort thru Unknowns - and your good intentioned ID is wrong. Then we need to work that much harder to convince the CID algorithm - if you don’t respond to the CID turning against yours. 1 wrong ID, and the newbie observer agrees with you - now we need FIVE identifiers to get the ID back on track.
I unfollow each obs as soon the CID has reached the limit of my ability and interest.
