The notification system in general is really bad. Messages are fine, but if I get tagged in a post I often don’t see them because my inbox is just so spammed with various nonsense notifications that are unfilterable and vanish if I click the wrong button. I just absolutely assaulted with observation field updates because of the sequencing work I do and it makes it extremely difficult to see anything that needs my direct attention.
10 Likes
For what it’s worth, this exists https://www.inaturalist.org/comments?q=@lothlin , it’s not easy to navigate but it does gather them all in one place and is better than nothing
4 Likes
Probably varies a lot from taxa to taxa and by location. At least in North American Lycosidae the user knowledge has improved to the point that more IDs are made. There is also a small “team” of world leaders who have put an incredible amount of effort into cleaning up identifications in the last year or two. Both of these have improved the CV models to the point where they are often correct instead of often wrong. For some new users, a sense of community will come naturally as they start recognizing user names and have special identification problems they have questions about. For others it may not but we still get to see a slice of their natural world.
1 Like
As far as I’m aware, it does still leave out all comments made within an ID (so will only collect comments posted separately)
2 Likes
I saw some comment about it somewhere on the forum but hadn’t got around to investigating. This comment made me wonder what I was missing, so I went looking, top, bottom and middle. I still can’t see anything, though? (iNat AU, if that makes any difference?)
1 Like
Probably makes a difference, yes.
My understanding is that blog posts are not regularly displayed for all users – people who use iNat in a language other than English or one of the network sites instead of .org do not see all blog posts. This is apparently intentional. I vaguely thought there was some other staff post where this was talked about, but this is all I managed to find in a search:
Blog can otherwise be accessed by scrolling to the very bottom of any page on the website and clicking on the link in the footer, but this requires that one remembers to check it regularly for new posts…
4 Likes
I find it concerning users are treated differently due to their language choice or their choice of network.
5 Likes
I don’t think you meant it in this way, but your response comes across a bit passive aggressive. The overall point was that things like that announcement need to be more prominent and somehow pushed out by iNat to users who want that information.
3 Likes
I’m on the Aussie site and it’s been quite obvious on the dashboard page.
Thanks - very helpful.
I can understand that if people don’t use English, pointing them to an English blog post may not be useful (though it does ignore people who prefer another language but still know English), but it seems an odd choice for English-speaking networks sites. I guess I’ll have to remember to check the blog at intervals. Good to know, though, thanks.
I don’t know what the difference is, but I’m only seeing the ID-a-thon results post linked there. Very odd.
For what it’s worth, I didn’t find it passive aggressive, I found it helpful. Sure, it doesn’t answer the overall point about lack of information, but it did point me to a post I was interested in looking at (and I assume there’s no way he could have solved the background communication issue anyway).
3 Likes
From the December 2025 Identifiers Survey Blog Post
”Look for our product roadmap blog post next week, which will include information about product improvements that address some of these issues. In addition to product changes, we’ll continue to improve messaging and engagement with both new and existing users, and create more help documentation in 2026.
Thank you so much to everyone who helps out others with identifications, and to those who took the time to fill out this survey. We plan to conduct more surveys of the wide range of iNaturalist community members in 2026 to get a better understanding of where things stand and where they can be improved.”
4 Likes
Thanks for sharing this — folks can see the full blog post with results here and discuss more specifics about surveys here! Like it says in the post, we’re planning to continue doing more surveys of the iNat community and sharing results as we can, so your feedback is very much appreciated.
10 Likes
Agreed with afdexter and, frankly, if iNat had changed in the manner he seemed to be envisioning, I think that would have jeopardised my own membership. Trying to have this schism between “casual users” and “true” enthusiasts; well who is a true enthusiast? Someone who really likes knowing the names of what’s around them but doesn’t care for or understand the vagaries of scientific taxonomy? People who really like posting pictures of pretty things they saw in their yard somewhere, which is still potentially useful data even if that isn’t the intent? I work as a taxonomist, but not on anything that really gets coverage on iNat; does that make me more or less “true”?
Part of the selling point of iNat is precisely that you can be whoever and get the same benefit: a repository for sightings that’s super-intuitive to use, with an ability to find out what you saw and interface with people who, to varying levels, know what things are. That’s it. That’s all it ever should be, and it’s alarming that one of its own creators seemed to miss that point and want to turn it into something that sees two tiers of users, only one of which has more right to use it; the others get sent onto, presumably, a different app. Why do “casual users” need a different app? Whether your intent is casual or not, the one correct ID answer will be the same for everyone.
And iNat’s interface is already so easy to use; I frankly didn’t even notice much difference between the classic and the new one and just presumed they’d done a big software upgrade, improved a bit of the utility (like zooming in on maps when geolocating your observation) and made it shinier. It didn’t annoy me and I knew nothing about any of the kerfuffles until I came here and read this.
As for AI, well iNat is already AI. The predictive ID function based on what’s “expected” around you is already a form of AI, and it already carries significant problems (which I’m sure tons of users have already covered) to the point where I constantly tell people not to trust any natural history app’s predictive function, including iNat, unconditionally. The idea that they’d take money to improve their existing AI capability doesn’t surprise me in the slightest and I really actually have no problem with it if it means better precision in its ID functions and info delivery. It doesn’t come at the exclusion of the human component, the moderating capability of which is actually AI working as intended, i.e. through the corrections and validations of the users, the precision of the algorithm improves.
I find it bitterly ironic that, through all the stupid, stupid attempts of society trying to find new uses for AI, the ones that consistently work best (not perfectly, just better than everyone else) are those who always found viable uses for it: the science sector. Yet we’ve gotten so Luddite about it that we’re now rejecting even that without understanding that it’s always been there, and that this is the best-case scenario for using it in a positive manner. Even if it had been communicated better, I doubt the people who were already prepared to be outraged by something like that would’ve changed their minds. And the solution certainly isn’t yet another app that divides the user base and gives quicker (read: less precise) info for “casual” users.
As far as I’m concerned, iNat should never pretend it’s better than, or not intended for, some people. It is not purely a scientific resource, nor is it purely a casual engagement outlet. Scientists who use it know the shortfalls of using the dataset; it’s the same as using any citizen-collected dataset, and will curate accordingly. All in all, that blog post read like one person’s personal differences with the wider leadership, which is always unfortunate, but these things happen. Most of this would have passed totally unknown to the majority of users (I only found out right now when I came to check something else).
14 Likes
One last blog post I’ll share directly here for now since I think it’ll be helpful in this discussion — we just published an overview of our January–June product goals. Please do continue keeping an eye on your iNat dashboard for future blog post updates, we’ll be sharing more as the year goes on!
12 Likes
Thanks for this, it’s great to see.
We’re also working to substantially reduce traffic from search/scraper bots to our website and Network Sites. While some automated traffic is inevitable on today’s internet, finding ways to cut down bots will help us reduce costs and let us focus on other site improvements.
I don’t know enough about the behind the scenes of the internet to know what other mechanisms are possible for this (I know a couple other citizen science websites stall me on some kind of bot-checking page for a couple seconds before letting me in), but requiring logging in to access more of the platform seems like a reasonable response to this that would also have some privacy benefits for users. I admire the openness of iNat and the fact that increasing amount of the internet are account-locked is kind of sad, but there are enough costs to it that it seems worth it to me.
3 Likes