Optimal recruitment

[epiphyte78]

just now i searched google news for “birders excited” and there were quite a few relevant results. same with “birders thrilled”.

clearly there’s a positive correlation for birders between rarity and endorphins. this can be quantified using donations to inat. and i’m sure it would have some influence on the distribution and abundance of birds. thanks to inat, everyone could easily filter for birds in a region and sort by endorphins. they’d see the birds at the top of the list and put out the appropriate bird food.

[jnstuart]

Really the birds that often get birders most excited are rare vagrants in their area (which I’ve sometimes referred to as “doomed vagrants”). Those birds are probably of no significance to the local bird fauna as they are strays from a breeding/ wintering population that occurs elsewhere. Great for your personal bird list or maybe a state checklist but not something of high conservation concern at that location.

[epiphyte78]

“doomed vagrants” aren’t always doomed, which is perhaps most obvious on remote islands, where founding vagrants might adaptively radiate into all the niches, thanks to darwin and sagan…

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game—none of them lasts forever. It is beyond our powers to predict the future. Catastrophic events have a way of sneaking up on us, of catching us unaware. Your own life, or your band’s, or even your species’ might be owed to a restless few—drawn, by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands and new worlds.

Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas…”

Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds— promising untold opportunities—beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting. - Carl Sagan

[jnstuart]

That’s true, not all are doomed, just maybe off-track temporarily. Or they’re pioneers. Which is why I use the term tongue-in-cheek.

[jmillsand]

Hm I think I may have been right earlier when I said we probably won’t see eye to eye on this. Feels like we’re doing a lot of talking past each other.

I appreciate the clearer explanation you provide in the beginning of this reply though, it does make me realize that parts of my understanding of your arguments were flawed (for example, the filtering by region does help sidestep some of the global inequity issue–it’s true I wouldn’t expect myself to try and prioritize a Floridian species if I was currently in Uttarakhand regardless of which was more “valued” overall). I still worry a bit about using money to add weight to the question of taste though… I know ranking by taste isn’t your main argument, it’s more utilitarian than that, but I do think it would play a part in the larger pattern of behavior in a concerning way.

@epiphyte78

you earmark your money to your local library because it’s more useful to you than your local botanic garden or zoo. or maybe you earmark more money to your local botanic garden and zoo. whatever the case, i’m pretty sure you don’t equally divide your money between all your local options.

I mean, yeah… but we’re arguing about changing how donations work within the same platform. I think it’s fair to keep the argument within the same platform because how I direct my contributions within iNat is a moot point if I donated to Wikipedia instead.

@epiphyte78

it seems strange to assume that where he just happened to dig is where the most valuable treasure in the world was.

I’m not saying that. I’m saying we don’t actually know where the “x” marking the spot is, so it’s silly to point to any patch of dirt and say “this is definitely where we need to dig!” We don’t know where the real treasure is (the market can’t indicate towards true unknowns), so letting people choose where to dig on their own seems about as productive as anything else.

@epiphyte78

the issue isn’t whether the rose bowl is built, the issue is where. i’m sure that there was a 2nd best location that would have become the 1st best if they had been able to see how valuable southern california’s only species of freshwater shrimp had been to the world.

I mean no offense here, but this feels painfully optimistic. It would be one thing if locals felt strongly enough to actively protest or otherwise cause actual, direct annoyance and impediment to the project, but that can happen regardless of a statistic. How many donations were given to the shrimp would just be a statistic unless the money was actually leveraged somehow.

@epiphyte78

ever heard of the orchid conservation alliance?

Actually, yes. Remember me saying I work with a Panamanian NGO? It was relevant to me so I became aware of it. Funny how that works.

@epiphyte78

peer pressure? if someone hands you an accurate treasure map, would you feel any pressure?

I argue against the accuracy, but yes–at the very minimum I would feel pressure not to deviate from the charted course (even if doing so would actually uncover a greater treasure, unbeknownst to the creators of the map).

@epiphyte78

i think the main issue is the relativity. maybe you’re willing to make a bigger sacrifice for reptiles than for plants.

Yep, but I think the main issue is not the relativity of my sacrifice but the comparison of that to others’ sacrifices. I may relatively sacrifice more for, say, reptiles than plants. But someone who sacrifices relatively more for plants may still end up sacrificing an explicitly larger amount for reptiles than I can. Hard to sort that out.

@epiphyte78

i’m confident that the correction would be relatively rapid, which would educate bezos and everyone else.

Why? There’s always the potential for a bandwagon effect here, wherein the more highly valued things continue to stay highly valued because they attract more attention than the others. Hard to swing the pendulum away when there’s a magnet pulling it to one side.

@epiphyte78

organizations either correctly adapt to changes in demand, or they go extinct. the challenge is actually seeing the demand. this wouldn’t be an issue if inat was a market.

But I, and clearly many others, have no current demand for iNat to change in this manner. However, as others have noted, iNat is part of a larger market. Another platform with the system you propose could be created and we could see how the demand for each plays out. But what a lot of my arguments in this thread come down to is that I don’t want to replace what we have now to experiment with the other approach. If both existed and one beat out the other, I would actually have no complaints because the market would have run its course. But if we replace one with the other we’ll have the same problem you’ve been discussing–we’ll never know which version actually had more societal value.

FWIW I do genuinely find your system intriguing. If it started on another platform, I would likely participate and would be curious to actually see how things play out. But as long as we’re trying to predict rather than test outcomes, I do have many misgivings.

[dgwdoesthings]

@epiphyte78

you know epiphytes? my username. there i was hiking up miravalles volcano in costa rica and there were fallen epiphytes literally everywhere. they die, breakdown, and nourish the phorophytes. i get it completely. but i just couldn’t take seeing so many incredibly cool and wonderful orchids, bromeliads, ferns, peperomias, ericaceaes, gesneriads and so on just die. i picked them up and put them in my backback. pretty quickly my backpack was completely full. then what? then hard decisions whenever i encountered a new fallen epiphyte. prioritization. anytime i wanted to put an epiphyte in my backpack, i had to make room by discarding the least valuable epiphyte. ouch.

when i finally returned to the lodge my backpack and arms were completely full. with the owner’s permission i spent the next few days attaching the rescued epiphytes to trees at the lodge. there was definitely a strong selection bias in terms of epiphytes pollinated by hummingbirds, such as columneas.

If you knew epiphytes at all you would know that what you did was probably not as helpful as you think.
Despite your good intentions, if you went back to that lodge today, most of those “rescued” probably did not survive much longer after.
Epiphytes have niches that they live in, and falling out of the canopy is part of their life cycle. Unless there is some external human cause to increase their rate of falling out of the canopy, you did the equivalent of giving cpr to roadkill(albeit a bit extreme of a simile).
Prioritization in conservation should focus on protecting these ecosystems and preventing habitat destruction, rather than trying to “rescue” individual plants that may not have been able to survive outside their natural context. Why the need to laser focus on a individual species, in most cases no one species is such a keystone and cannot exist in a vacuum.

Money alone isn’t a reliable way to prioritize conservation efforts because it often reflects short-term interests rather than long-term ecological value. Many species that are crucial to ecosystem stability don’t have the financial backing of more charismatic or commercially valuable ones. Effective prioritization should focus on ecological importance, rarity, and vulnerability, not just economic worth. Money and capital based systems are inherently flawed and relying on them for conservation is not the way.

[epiphyte78]

for several decades now i’ve grown an extremely wide variety of epiphytes extensively and exhaustively in hot, cold and dry southern california, primarily outdoors year around. so on miravalles volcano i wasn’t prioritizing which epiphytes to save based solely on their prettiness. upper canopy epiphytes, which are exposed to full sun, wind and regular drought, are completely, obviously and tangibly different from epiphytes that grow lower on the trees swaddled in wet moss and shade. while i certainly appreciated the wimpy, delicate and fragile epiphytes, it would have been a big waste of my limited time, energy, space and effort to try and save them. so i prioritized rescuing the sturdiest of the most sturdy epiphytes, and i wouldn’t be surprised if they are currently happily growing on the trees at the lodge and making the local hummingbirds even happier.

the amount of epiphyte knowledge in my head could easily fill an entire library. i’m not saying this to brag, i’m saying this to help you understand that i wouldn’t spend my time or money trying to save, or promote, random epiphytes. my epiphyte prioritization would be based on a mountain of information.

if we had the opportunity to use our money to help prioritize epiphytes on inaturalist, sure there would be the novices with only one orchid youtube video under their belt, who would solely judge epiphytes by their beauty, and they would spend their money accordingly. would they outspend the epiphyte experts such as myself? i dunno. all i know is that with the current system, where everyone has the same exact influence via the star button, the experts get annihilated by the novices.

experts, the nerdiest of the super nerds, are always going to be in the very tiny minority so they will always be destroyed by tyranny of the majority, such as stars, thumbs up, hearts, likes and so on.

it would be a completely different story in a system based on ranking with money. in such a system the experts would have far more influence than they currently have. and everyone would benefit from this. all the organisms in the world would benefit from this.

the fairness of democracy sounds nice and equitable, but it completely squanders the nearly endless knowledge of experts in every field and area. the only way for all this knowledge to do the most good would be to replace voting with donating.

[dgwdoesthings]

First off, I am sorry for assuming your lack of knowledge on epiphytes.

You have a kernel of truth, specialized knowledge can often be overpowered out by a less informed majority, however the suggested solution to replace democratic voting through other means of expressing interest with financial contributions would likely introduce more problems than it solves.
How is money any different than the tyranny of the majority? If these experts and thus nerd are in the minority, which I agree. Why are you claiming their funding of their interests would not also be in the minority. Being a nerd is not a particularly lucrative personality, especially nature/biological science nerds.
By prioritizing monetary influence, the proposed system would risk exacerbating inequalities, sidelining those who cannot afford to donate, and turning a platform meant to facilitate knowledge sharing into a competition of wealth.
As already said by @spiphany, money is relative and not everyone can make the sacrifices to donate as much as their interest and perceived importance of the subject, because money is needed within society in exchange for goods and services and thus staying alive. Most passionate nerds would have the (maybe flawed) self preservation to not squander themselves over the conservation/research of a subject.
Instead, the focus should remain on creating systems that allow for inclusive participation and encourage collaborative expertise without excluding those who lack financial resources but have a wealth of knowledge to offer. Which I believe iNaturalist as a platform in it’s current state does a better job than your proposal.

You seem to be doubling down on your view and not listening to the concerns of others on your proposals. Although this debate is mostly irrelevant, it has already been said that what you propose is more of a feature request (that has turned out to be unpopular).
I would really appreciate if you went back and read through others replies to you and really consider what they are saying. Although you have some good point among your (what I consider to be flawed) argument, you fail to recognize that others might also have a little “yin” in their “yang”.

[sedgequeen]

@epiphyte78

please rank the above activities based on your perception of their usefulness to society. whether you do this or not, it can be done. no two activities are equally useful to society.

Do you really think I’m IDing on iNaturalist because I think that has more value to society than some of the other things I could be doing? I’m not. I’m IDing on iNaturalist because I enjoy doing it. I’ve enjoyed identifying things in other contexts most of my life. I enjoy it here, now. (I do also think this has value to society and that it is a good way to use my particular skills, of course. Large parts of society may disagree.)

[hawkparty]

when it comes to ficus timlada, it would be ranked way higher with donations than with democracy. all the little known plants and animals would be ranked way higher with donations than with democracy. again, this is simply because democracy is tyranny of the majority, and the majority of people do not know about ficus timlada or any of the other little known organisms.

I’m not sure you understand how specialties work? I am a Accipitriforme identifier. I identify accipitriformes. If you suddenly started paying people to identify ficus, I would not start identifying ficus, because I don’t know anything about them, because trees and birds of prey are different organisms.

Or, if I was say, a less principled user, I would add whatever random identification I could think of. Why not, I’ll get paid. Who cares if this isn’t my field of expertise, you’ve now motivated me to not add free identifications to the things I actually know about, I’m going to spam every single ficus observation until whoever donated runs out of money.

You realize that the world exists outside of venture capital right? What you are proposing would absolutely ruin the purpose of this website for most users and tank the data quality while you’re at it

[hawkparty]

i don’t know which organisms on inaturalist you’d sacrifice the most money for. you’re the only one with this information. since nobody else has it, then for sure it’s not going to have any influence on recruitment. so it’s a given that recruitment is going to be extremely suboptimal.

Hypothetical: I am incredibly rich. I decide that I, personally, dislike a tree you think is very important. Lets just say because I think its ugly, or there’s one in front of my house that blocks my view, or one fell on my car once. Thus I donate a couple million dollars to boost another every other tree in the same genus over it so it is the “least important”. How does this help in any way, other than proving I have more money than you and very petty opinions on trees?

[hawkparty]

clearly you’re assuming two things…

1. your preferences matter
2. words are adequate at conveying them

And you seem to be assuming that your suggestion is

1. Reasonable, we just aren’t understanding it
2. More important than the preferences of everyone who has disagreed with you

I would like to propose that everyone has understood your proposal just fine, it just isn’t reasonable or practical and thus we are against it. Explaining first year business strategy to us isn’t really going to change that.

If everyone in this thread were to donate in opposition to this proposal, would you accept that it isn’t practical?

[epiphyte78]

my 5th observation in 10 years is a bird of prey. i uploaded that bird just for you. do you feel grateful? obviously i have no idea how you feel about that bird. this is something you would have to communicate.

conversely, if you uploaded a photo of a ficus benjamina tree just for me, i would not feel grateful at all, because it’s a very common tree. inat already has plenty of photos of this tree. so from my perspective, you’d be bringing sand to the beach.

compare the pic i just uploaded to this bird of prey pic that i uploaded 20 years ago. that pic was taken with a serious camera with a telephoto lens. the pic i submitted today was taken with my cell phone.

my uncle was a very serious birder and his favorite birds by far were raptors. not only would he professionally photograph them but he would professionally paint them as well. when i was growing up we often went hiking together and he pointed out and identified every bird of prey we saw. he was always excited to spot one, but not equally so. wish i could remember which raptors excited him the most.

thanks to my uncle, i definitely appreciate birds of prey more than most people. and if one landed on a branch right in front of me, for sure i’d try to take a pic of it with my phone. but it’s not like i’ll go too far out of my way to try and take good pics of them. instead, i’ll go really far to try and take good pics of a rare ficus.

sadly, when you were growing up you didn’t have an uncle who instilled in you a sense of appreciation for ficus. so you don’t appreciate them like i appreciate birds of prey. but there’s no reason that you can’t learn to appreciate a nice ficus. should you though? obviously it’s up to you. the trick is understanding that you can’t make a truly informed decision without knowing how important ficus are to me and everyone else.

[wren-falcon]

@epiphyte78

youtube already tracks views and this seems to strongly influence the ranking. but the ranking is incredibly atrocious. the most viewed content is so bad that i wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies. the vast majority of people with time to spare aren’t spending it on anything remotely resembling self-improvement. this encourages the production of even more useless content, and the result is a vicious cycle of ignorance.

YouTube’s algorithm is complicated and is ultimately meant to maximize profits for YouTube, not to give users the best experience. The algorithm encourages creators to produce content rapidly and cheaply, which leads to low quality content - they can put out low quality content and still get enough views to make it worthwhile financially. It also encourages the creators to put sensational thumbnails and titles on their videos, clickbait, since (1) a sensational thumbnail/title is more likely to get viewers to click on the video and start watching, and (2) several creators have noted that the algorithm seems to recommend videos with sensational thumbnails, especially ones that contain an image of a face. This same process is also happening to many online news outlets. Ultimately, I see the problem being that the overall system encourages profit-chasing while not ensuring that services and businesses are faithful to their clients and customers and act in their best interests.
Additionally, this system (and YouTube’s algorithm) makes it costly to produce high-quality content, as genuine improvements see little reward.
It absolutely is a vicious and toxic cycle, but I don’t believe that it’s happening in the way you’re describing.

[hawkparty]

@epiphyte78

my 5th observation in 10 years is a bird of prey. i uploaded that bird just for you. do you feel grateful? obviously i have no idea how you feel about that bird. this is something you would have to communicate.

I think that there is some kind of fundamental roadblock here in that you do not seem to understand the basic human concept of “doing things for enjoyment”

I’m not identifying it because I feel grateful you uploaded it, or because I think its the most important thing to identify, or because I have some kind of monetary incentive. I identify accipitriformes because I think its fun, and I like hawks. You could impress upon me via a million dollar valuation that ficus trees are the most important tree in the world and I still wouldn’t switch to ficus from hawks, because I don’t enjoy plant id.

conversely, if you uploaded a photo of a ficus benjamina tree just for me, i would not feel grateful at all, because it’s a very common tree. inat already has plenty of photos of this tree. so from my perspective, you’d be bringing sand to the beach.

I am not entirely sure how to phrase this… People do things for reasons entirely independent from you and expecting an entire platform to change so that you can force them to take your opinion into account via monetary incentives isn’t going to change that, its just going to make people stop using the platform.

Like as far as I can tell, throughout this entire thread, the basis seems to be this: You are upset people are not prioritizing a species that you believe is important. You are upset that there is no way to artificially boost the visibility of this species you care about, so you want the platform to change in a way that allows you to use a form of capital that you have(money) to force people to care about it. I am trying to explain that if you do this, people are not going to suddenly start caring about ficus, they are just going to stop using the platform that shoves something they don’t care about in their faces.

And the reason I say a form of capital that you have is because it seems pretty clearly suited to your needs. Why not award tokens based off the amount of biology research paper publications an individual has? Or based off the amount of identifications they’ve contributed? Or any other metric? Because I assume you have money, thus you could use it to manipulate the system in the way that you want to.

And I see you haven’t responded to my point about bad actors so I reiterate: What if someone with more money than you uses it to push the “importance” of your species down for no reason other than pettiness?

sadly, when you were growing up you didn’t have an uncle who instilled in you a sense of appreciation for ficus. so you don’t appreciate them like i appreciate birds of prey. but there’s no reason that you can’t learn to appreciate a nice ficus. should you though? obviously it’s up to you. the trick is understanding that you can’t make a truly informed decision without knowing how important ficus are to me and everyone else.

I actually can make a completely informed decision on whether or not I should appreciate ficus without having to know how important ficus are to you. It’s informed by the fact that I can choose to spend my free time however I want to, and you aren’t paying me, so I don’t have any obligation to care how important you think ficus is. Outside of you directly paying me to care about ficus, no amount of “importance” is going to make me care. I’m not sure why you think that your opinion should influence my actions.

“Pleasing shareholders” is a terrible philosophy to bring to a citizen science initiative. Or any initiative. It renders all of the data vulnerable to bad actors with more money than you, and you seem to assume that access to money is directly proportionate to the value of your opinion. If I can verify that I have more money than you do, does that make my opinion in this thread more valuable than yours?

Or put another way: how much money would incentivize you to drop this idea completely?

[papernautilus]

Over the course of your lengthy rants, all you’ve managed to do is create an antipathy to Ficus in me. If I see one, I’ll probably turn around and take a picture of crabgrass instead.

[epiphyte78]

nobody forces me to sort observations by their popularity (stars clicked). it’s entirely optional. just like it would be entirely optional for you to sort observations by their value (donations given). so why would this option make people stop using the platform?

you didn’t click the star button for my observation of a cooper’s hawk. but if you had, so what? so what if 1000 people clicked the button star button for my hawk observation? this would somehow force me to take and submit more pics of cooper’s hawks? of course not.

if you posted a pic of a rare ficus, and people donated $500 bucks for it, this would somehow force you to take and submit more pics of rare ficus? of course not. you keep throwing around the word “force” as if somehow money would be used to twist your arm into behaving in a way anathema to your very nature. either you’re badly misunderstanding me, or i’m not making myself perfectly clear, so let me reiterate… there would be absolutely no force involved. nobody would be forced to donate. nobody who donated would be forced to use this perk. if anyone did use this perk, nobody would be forced to be influenced by it. nobody would be forced to reciprocate in any way.

let me try to put it as simply as possible. with my proposal, we’d have the option to know which organisms inat donors were most interested in. and trust me, i know it’s not going to be ficus. it’s probably going to be birds, but i have absolutely no idea which birds. you’d be completely free to ignore this information. personally i wouldn’t. i’d be very much interested in seeing and knowing which birds inat donors care about the most.

[seblivia]

@epiphyte78

just like it would be entirely optional for you to sort observations by their value (donations given)

@epiphyte78

let me try to put it as simply as possible. with my proposal, we’d have the option to know which organisms inat donors were most interested in.

I think I’m mostly confused as to how this would be useful? Sure, you could see that people who donate to the site like a specific organism more, but the “favourites” system already allows people to show which observations they like, without there being a barrier preventing those who don’t have money to spare from making their opinion known.

I suppose I just don’t understand the focus on a money-based voting system, when there are already perfectly good features on the site allowing you to see what observations people enjoyed.

I want to assume good faith here, and believe that you’re genuinely trying to suggest improvements to the site, but your fixation on voting with money and shooting down every critique offered leads me to question whether you’re really interested in improving anything, or whether you simply think the site should cater to those with money and put the whims of the wealthy above all else at the expense of actual functionality.

Regardless of your intent, the suggestion of having an option to filter observations by ones people would pay to see more of gives the impression that you value the opinions of people with more money above anyone else, and I don’t think that’s a particularly good way of judging the value of people’s input

[paul_dennehy]

@epiphyte78

it would be a completely different story in a system based on ranking with money. in such a system the experts would have far more influence than they currently have. and everyone would benefit from this. all the organisms in the world would benefit from this.

the fairness of democracy sounds nice and equitable, but it completely squanders the nearly endless knowledge of experts in every field and area. the only way for all this knowledge to do the most good would be to replace voting with donating.

Doesn’t this assume that expertise = money though? You’re saying that most people don’t know about obscure organisms, then somehow leaping to the conclusion that if everyone threw money at the organisms they care about, somehow the obscure organisms would all be better known? The experts who care about most obscure organisms are generally not rich. The rich millionaires of the world generally don’t care about obscure organisms. We already live in this world you propose, where the things people throw the most money at get the most attention. If you really have the money to throw at people to make them care about specific plants, then go hire some people to ID those plants and promote them. No one is stopping you. But you’ll be up against a multi-billion dollar segment of society that promotes the value of other species- monarch butterflies, pandas, polar bears, tigers, ghost orchids… these are the big money-making species.

It’s a pretty common view that this is a problem- that “replacing voting with donating” is problem because it replaces what you’re calling “tyranny of the majority” with “tyranny of the ultra-rich minority”. Somehow you’re equating the “minority” of people with piles of money to throw around with the “minority” of people who are taxon experts and nerds. You express disdain for a system where “the experts get annihilated by the novices”, but you propose a system where the experts and novices alike get annihilated by a handful of millionaire donors.

@epiphyte78

my epiphyte prioritization would be based on a mountain of information

… and then Elon Musk would come along and obliterate all your attempts at prioritization by throwing 5 million bucks at one common species that he thinks looks cute.

@epiphyte78

would they outspend the epiphyte experts such as myself? i dunno.

Yes, yes they would. They already are, and that’s why people are aware of species you don’t care much about, and unaware of the species you prefer.

I personally love Gelechiid moths. They’re mostly tiny little brown moths, poorly known, most species still undescribed, require dissection under a microscope to identify in many cases. Most people don’t care about them, but I do. But here’s the thing… I don’t care. I don’t need other people to prioritize them for me to care about them. I’m not under the delusion that everyone would love them if only I and the other 8 people in the world who like them had the opportunity to donate money to promote them. I could already donate all my life savings to Gelechiid-promotion, but that’s not going to do anything because I’m poor. The combined wealth of all the world’s Gelechiid enthusiasts probably amounts to less than what Morgan Freeman spent to introduce non-native bees to his property in 2019. On your hypothetical platform allowing us to donate in the name of our favorite Gelechiids, we’d be no more able to outspend and out-promote the “save the monarchs” brigade than we already are. And we’d be right back to where we are- the already-well-known species being “higher ranked” than obscure things with one random nerd throwing five bucks at them.

I think my fundamental problem with this entire thread is that the claim “in a system based on ranking with money… the experts would have far more influence than they currently have” just seems so self-evidently false that I’m not even sure how one draws this conclusion. I don’t know any experts in the taxa I study who have money to throw around in the way you’re suggesting. I know lots of people who donate large sums to conservation, but I wouldn’t consider them “experts” in any taxon in particular. To value someone’s opinion based on how much money they put behind it is the very antithesis of valuing expertise. To hear “more money should equal louder speech” held up as an ideal to promote expertise is honestly incomprehensible as an argument, which I think is why no one else on this thread is agreeing with these proposals.

[epiphyte78]

@seblivia

Regardless of your intent, the suggestion of having an option to filter observations by ones people would pay to see more of gives the impression that you value the opinions of people with more money above anyone else, and I don’t think that’s a particularly good way of judging the value of people’s input

inat currently has a system where everyone has equal influence on a ranking of observations… the star system. i’m not proposing we eliminate this. i’m proposing that we add a 2nd ranking system, where donors have extra influence on a different ranking of observations… the supporter system. you could have two browser windows open side by side…

left window (star system) right window (supporter system)

the #1 observation on the left is an insect. the #1 observation on the right is a bird.

who knows.

it seems like i value the opinions of people with more money than anyone else? that’s not quite right. it’s more like i want to actually know the opinions of people who value this site enough to support its continued existence. they care about animals more than plants? if so, which animals do they care about the most? birds?

i bet you’re going to find the supporter ranking far more useful than the star ranking. but i might be wrong.