I just read a huge comment thread on iNaturalist. There is a basic internal conflict in iNaturalist, which I currently see expressed in three ways:
Engagement vs Data
Observers vs Identifiers
Moderation (play nice) vs Curation (taxonomy)
I actually see all of this as more of a feature than a bug, since iNat is, AFAIK, the most successful citizen science tool ever developed.
A topic is supposed to have a direction, and I could invent a direction, but many of you reading this will think of 17 different directions that are more interesting than anything I could come up with.
(being a bit cheeky here⌠sometimes, rather than cursing the site for its shortcomings, I alter my âinterpretative frameworkâ to view iNaturalist as a tech demo/showcase for âComputer Visionâ technology, first and foremost. All of a sudden, some design/function choices and the rejection/delaying of user-friendly features seem to make a lot more sense⌠;))
As has been said before, but everyone has their own idea of how to use the site and what the goals of the site are. When those goal clash there will be disagreement. I had someone recently who felt that I should have taken time explaining why I put disagreeing ID. My goal was curation, theirs was education.
Since there are many applications for how this is used, there will likely always be minor conflicts.
INat is a human activity that involves human interaction. Of course there will be disagreements on various aspects and some conflict. What human activity that involves a diverse group of people doesnât have this?
I think iNaturalist was designed for a couple of thousand dedicated users with provisions to grow 100 times bigger.
The exponential growth continued way past that. The user interface, data and geo models scaled up well, CV learning is working, but the sheer scale of historic and new data means added searches and features are needed to make it all accessible.
The influx of new and casual users means the original optimistic notion that all observations will become RG at taxa or at higher level is no longer tenable.
The shortcomings, I think, are of a system pushed by rapid, exponential growth in volumes.
Yeah, I wonder if that was ever feasible. Even a physical museum collection has specimens that remain unIDed or only coarsely IDed. Iâve seen some pretty bad museum specimens that perhaps did not deserve to be curated. Not every photo or physical specimen can be narrowed down to species or even genus.
When I first started posting records to iNat in 2013, the total number of records on the site was well under a half-million. Itâs over 230 million today. That kind of growth is associated with growing pains.
Iâm not sure what the original intent of the creators was, and it may not even matter (not anymore). iNat is now what it is, weâre in it, we all deal with it.
My remark was just a though experiment: what if, instead of seeing iNaturalist from the usual perspective âuser community / engagement / observations / identifiers / RG data / taxonomy / curators / science / usersâ needs / usabilityâ (and therefore a range of shortcomings, missing features, etc.)âŚ
⌠we judge it as a mere technological experiment?
Nowadays, CV works very well (and will keep improving, virtually forever); the âbrandâ is well-known (by both laymen and scientists, worldwide); iNat has scientific papers and a laaaarge user base to show, if in need of funding or recognition.
So⌠job done. Well done iNat creators, mission accomplished. Thereâs nothing left to invent or tweak or fix anymore, wrt visibility and efficiency and marketability. Pleasing or appeasing a handful of pesky âidentifiersâ âtaxonomistsâ or âfeature requestersâ? Why not but why care? They are not really needed anymore. There are bazillions of happy users and observers feeding data to our CV already, each and every second. /end of perspective shift
I mostly agree with this perspective. Taxonomic battles existed well before iNat and they wonât be resolved by the iNat curators. Feature Requests to the website often seem very niche and most are probably beyond the ability of staff to implement given available time and personnel, even if some are desired by many. Many submitted records will remain forever in âNeeds IDâ purgatory. But overall the site functions pretty well. Iâm not unhappy.
I tend to recoil at the use of the word âconflictâ. In the modern world, that term has so much negative baggage or implications. How about âcontrastsâ or âdivergent usesâ or âdiverse perspectives for various usersâ. Fundamentally, I donât see the side-by-side expression of âengagementâ and âdata collectionâ as conflicting, but rather just the siteâs multi-use capability.
I donât necessarily see the three axes in the OP as in âconflictâ - they can and often do reinforce each other rather than be in conflict. For number 1, for example, I think one thing that drives engagement is the fact that people feel like theyâre contributing to a scientific data set, and that they are getting feedback from experts, which makes them want to engage more. And for people interested in curating and using the data, a bigger, more diverse data set and community of engaged users is helpful. But, weâre a huge and diverse community and conflict will also happen as well. I sometimes think of it more as a âtensionâ, which is maybe semantics but I think describes it better for me.
I also often have the same reaction, but in High Conflict, the Amanda Ripley book that came out a few years ago, she defines at least two types of conflict: good conflict, and high conflict.
Iâm paraphrasing, but good conflict is defined as conflict that is useful, that helps people come to better underestanding, or arrive at a consensus, maybe. High conflict is when the conflict is the point - basically a feud. So I donât think conflict is inherently bad, even if it can often be uncomfortable. It can be necessary and healthy. I think the vast majority of conflict on iNat is of the healthy variety, and one reason the Community Guidelines say
You donât have to have the last word. Sometimes differences cannot be resolved. Learn to recognize when this has happened and resist the urge to reply if you have nothing constructive to add to a conversation.
is to try and deter people from getting into that high conflict state.
(I heard about the book via this segment on KQED Forum, and you can find various talks and interviews on YouTube if youâre interested.)
FWIW, you can read the original iNaturalist Final Report from Berkeley iSchool here.
First, these tensions exist primarily in the community, and secondarily in the product as designed. I think this is correct; they are for all of us to negotiate. Software design decisions can change the shape of the tension, and rarely make it go away. And they are tensions to the extent that attending to one side makes it harder to attend to the other. That said:
This is true of any site or software tool, and worth bringing up. iNaturalist users have only soft power, and that thanks to the attention and conscientiousness of staff. Product strategy is not negotiated with the community and is largely opaque, known through comments, work, and non-work. Thatâs not surprising or abnormal, but it also doesnât need to be the case. The people investing tens, hundreds, or thousands of hours a year in the platform should perhaps have some real stakes in how it operates.
The platform, or staff, for their part, have a right to autonomy and privacy. One more âconflictâ that can be found in any product is a choice between prioritizing existing users vs potential users; existing use-cases vs potential use-cases; quality vs functionality; service vs growth; or even just making good on prior commitments vs doing what you need to do to survive. That decision-making is hard, and it can feel much harder if done in a fishbowl.
Finally, and relatedly, Iâd say there is a tension between building something simple and global (think Twitter, Google) vs taking on the complexity and costs of attending to the divergent needs of the communities that form around places and taxa (Facebook, Amazon/AWS, I guess). Itâs not hard to think of ways to walk that line better, but Iâm actually very impressed with how âgood enoughâ the current design is for a diverse set of people with diverse needs.
No species of living organism is a perfect fit to its environment but all are âgood enoughâ to persist and leave behind offspring that carry on the lineage. If that species is meant to survive under changing conditions, it will have some inherent flexibility to adapt. You can think of iNat in the same way: not perfect, not fully equipped for every contingency its users might want or need, but good enough to persist.
Sometimes, the feeling of conflict comes from having had the last word â as in when people stop engaging in a conversation that you had hoped would keep going.
âMeant toâ seems to reflect a deistic view of the living world. I donât believe in a higher entity that has intentions for this planet or designs flexibility into species for their survival after environmental change. I would take the metaphor in a different direction. Any species will go extinct if conditions change sufficiently. iNat will also cease to exist after we deplete the resources (energy, raw materials, transport facilities, etc) needed for computer use. We should be thinking about iNatâs successors in the post-industrial environment.
I canât help but feel that this is a real issue. Which is funny, because it is the curators who are also tasked with moderation, to a great extent.
One of my particular gripes is that appalling behaviour appears to be frequently permitted in people with enormous numbers of observations or identifications. They may get some of the most egregious comments hidden, but suspensions rarely appear to take place for people in this category.