I feel using your analogy is more like posting on facebook and only allow liking your post and muting anything else…and the reader is only informed of this policy after engaging with your post… opting out kills any serious discourse, as it gives the OP the mighty power to overrule everybode else.
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Staying with FB - you can (and people do) close comments.
You are only permitted to 
my post.
iNat’s opt out doesn’t prevent identifiers engaging - the observer WANTS an ID. And gets the engagement as everyone else does. I see you are an active identifier, so opted outs clearly don’t bother you.
Now you’ve lost me. Even opted IN, my ID is unchanged. Opted out makes the ‘Community’ ID mine, all mine.
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It’s there, but there’s no convenient way to interact with it. It’s exactly the same issue people are having on the other side—if someone’s opted out, this has precisely zero effect on your ability to contributed identifications, but you don’t have any convenient way to interact with those identifications.
It’s the best I can do to describe my experience. I know that it is not a good description of your experience.
It´s not the same, as my possibly wrong ID can be corrected without my help… and then will not spoil maps and lists anymore
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You can correct the ID of an opted-out observation at your discretion. You just don’t have an easy way to interact with the corrected ID.
I don´t need to intereact with my ID… but the then maybe still wrong opted out ID still interacts with a lot of iNats features… I see a huge difference in that
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If you prefer an observation to be filed under one name, I another name, there isn’t an inherent reason to privilege one viewpoint over the other. Of course one is biased in favor of whichever role one happens to occupy at the moment.
I agree entirely that it is undesirable for a choice on my part to privilege my own viewpoint for my observations to adversely affect the ability of other people to interact with observations in the way they prefer. However, the inverse is also undesirable, for the preferences of others to adversely affect my ability to interact with my observations as I wish. The problem is that it’s a zero sum game. When your preferences and mine differ, one of us must “win” and the other must “lose”. This is an avoidable flaw in how iNaturalist is structured. The most obvious solution is a box in the filters somewhere that says “query by my [or another specified user’s] ID rather than the community ID”. Voilá, no forced choice, our differing preferences are no longer in conflict.
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The basic idea I’m trying to get across is that there are different and equally legitimate things people are trying to accomplish, and that these are currently but do not need to be in conflict.
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John says it’s a beetle. 3 of us say it’s a bee. John wins. We 3 have zero effect on the ID. And hence, zero interest in adding an unwanted ID.
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I didn’t understand how this would work (replacing the opt-out option, or working with it?):
As long as opting out is possible, I need a filter opted_out=false.
And something like this would be relevant:
No forced choice. I agree.
I see the absence of such a filter (or banner) as a preference in favor of observers that have opted out, because their observations will be visited by more identifiers than the observations of observers that have not opted out.
Imagine 2 sets of identical observations, 1 set published with opt-out, 1 set published without opt-out, each set with the same IDs, or lack of IDs, from the 2 observers. What is going to happen, with regard to the time spent by identifiers, and with regard to the global added value after a long period of time?
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For me, it would replace it. If I can look up “observations I called Alpha beta” in some user-friendly fashion (i.e., not via the current inaturalist.org/identifications interface), I wouldn’t have any reason to opt out. I don’t know if others would still have use for the opt out feature. Unless a compelling argument I’m not aware of were to arise, my own inclination would be to get rid of opting out even if there were a few people who still wanted it.
I agree entirely re. filtering. My viewpoint is: make iNaturalist as useful as it can be for as many people as possible, with as few conflicts as possible. If there’s some set of observations people want to be able to separate out because they either do or do not want to see them, creating that functionality is inherently good.
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In that case, there are five identifications associated with the observation: John’s; yours and those of two others; the community ID. The community ID is not the only one that matters, it’s just the only one we can access easily in ‘Explore’ and related pages.
Imagine, for instance, you could toggle something in the filters and it would display the majority ID rather than the community ID.
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Keep in mind the community taxon is not necessarily the searchable taxon displayed across the top of the page the page, even in cases where opting out hasn’t had influence. The real community taxon can be seen in the righthand side bar and does not always match. Identifiers often learn this when the A hot key doesn’t do what they expected it to do.
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Yes, that was recently in my “still learning about iNaturalist 9 years later” category! As I understand it, the “observation ID” at top is either
- the observer’s ID when opted out, or
- the current leading ID when not in conflict with the Community ID (the two are often but not always the same).
And yes, that is currently the searchable taxon as I understand it too.
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Thanks for the clarification, @arboretum_amy & @jdmore. I’d encountered the occasional discrepancy, but didn’t have a good understanding of what exactly it signified.
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No, because the other identifications are there and visible; they just don’t edit the OP.
To continue the Facebook analogy: John posts expressing an opinion. 3 of you comment expressing a contrary opinion. You 3 have zero effect on the content of John’s OP – but your comments are still there, and anyone else can read them. From what I have seen of Facebook, commentators are not discouraged or deterred by this.
Because I choose to ID a lot of Unknowns, and to hammer the trapped in limbo with Help please? @mentions
My target is to make the Display ID, something that skilled identifiers can filter for.
If I can get plants to family I’m happy because I see IDs roll in. I don’t care about the Display ID on Opted Out when it is useful (plant family at least). But if Opted Out has trapped it at Plantae … that is rude to plant identifiers, who are dutifully hammering it with yet another ID, and fuming!
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Unlike Facebook where people can hold different subjective opinions. iNat isn’t a philosphy or political debate. With lifeforms there is one right answer and a whole lot of wrong ones. John in this case should change his “opinion” on the ID based on the community ID, or else be prepared to defend it with evidence. If he can’t defend it with evidence, the community ID should override. If John is right and his Maverick view is correct, he should easily be able to convince the community and get them to agree or withdraw (leaving his ID as the winner). Still seeing opting out as saying “John knows more than all of you, I don’t care if 100 of you disagree”.
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