I don’t see complains, it’s sad people waste not only their time, but time og those who have to review hundreds of useless notifications from them, but nothing can stop them, so there’s no need of complains, only grievance.
I agree. I’m also not happy with the amount of speculation that’s going on here, which is the opposite of what iNat is about and is something I’m seeing more of the forum. Unless you’ve talked to someone and asked them, you likely do not know why they behave the way they do. As humans we make assumptions and personally I’ve found that mine are often incorrect or at least not as nuanced as they should be, espeically when it comes to something as complex and diverse as human motivations. Heck, I think all of us only partly know why think the way we do.
Let’s try and celebrate that there are people who want to participate in the community, and if that means they’re adding a 4th or 5th agreeing ID, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe they’re learning. Maybe they just like snakes and want to identify them as they go through photos. Maybe they are just racing up the leaderboard - that’s not a terrible thing, as long as they’re accurate and taking community feedback into account. If someone is not doing that, please notify us - that’s why we made a recent addition to the Community Guidelines. We can all choose what we might respect more, or give more credit to, but let’s not take people down.
I should also note that expertise is in many ways relative. When I went to Australia I couldn’t identify common taxa and I’m sure some folks who identified my observations of common species wouldn’t consider themselves experts. But they knew the commonly-seen plants and animals there while I was totally clueless, and those users were able to help me out (for which I’m grateful), even if to them it was just another Acacia decurrens.
29 Likes
I think it’s quite easy to avoid all the conjecture on motivations if people just add a description to their Bio on their profile (except you can’t see this on mobile(?), grrrr).
Example (sorry for the callout): https://www.inaturalist.org/people/louisb
Great explanation and reasoning that you can act on.
Even a simple one like this: https://www.inaturalist.org/people/trichopria
Quite clear David is qualified to give specific ID’s in a difficult taxa.
Makes it much easier for if you’re using the leaderboard to find someone to contact or @ for ID help. And if you’re one of the high-volume ID’ers that get a lot of notifications you can’t sift through, note that on your bio page so people don’t waste time waiting :)
7 Likes
If we ever get to a point where people are having to provide pre-emptive justifications for their IDing behaviour to avoid snark, I’d be hanging up my ID hat and riding into the sunset. 
6 Likes
That’s not the point though, the point is to help people when looking for information. I think reducing potential ‘snark’ regardless of how ignore-able it is, is a useful side-effect at least.
3 Likes
Yes it could help for sure. Feels a bit too much like a dating app bio for my liking 
Great idea to celebrate the identifiers. Without them iNaturalist would be an empty shell. I’m very grateful to them all. I can play outside and explore all the beauty and they tell me what it is, always kind and often with explanation if I guessed wrong (again). Maybe we should have a Day of the Identifier each year to thank and celebrate them collectively.
11 Likes
My chosen slice of iNat. Busy with IDs. I haven’t yet come across one identifier, who I feel is gaming the leaderboards. The new people who are finding their way around, might race up for a day or two, then they lose interest. If I am trying to find an @mention for a new to me taxon - I do use the leaderboard. Check the profile - hoping for - working on the taxonomy of Newtome. Also skim their obs, where and what. Then their IDs.
For me, leaderboards are a tool I use frequently every day.
8 Likes
FWIW there was one user about whom we received complaints from multiple people who thought they were trying to top the leaderboard - and it seemed like that to me as well. When I was finally able to contact them, that didn’t seem to be the case at all - they just thought they were helping everyone out and didn’t understand the ramifications of their actions. (Yes, they could have been lying but I don’t think so/)
8 Likes
I had a similar story as a newbie: When I first started id’ing, I apparently misread the description at the site and thought everything needed 2 to get to RG, but a third to get to GBIF, so… learning curve. ;)
7 Likes
As in observing and uploading, also in identifying there are many levels of learning and expertise. If a newbie starts his identifying career by carefully agreeing that a crow is a crow … well, we all had to start somewhere, didn’t we?
As for the level of expertise … of course we won’t know to begin with. But it didn’t take me forever to find out who of “my” identifiiers actually have knowledge, who don’t have too much knowledge but really try their best, and those few who are parrots. Anyway, receiving only 2 IDs instead of 5 doesn’t tell me anything at all about the expertise of those identifiers either.
EDIT: However, I totally understand why someone would be unsettled by receiving 100s of notifications daily. To this point, my obs/ID stock is not that big for this to happen to me, and if there’s a day with 50 notifications I am actually happy about it. But for observers/identifiers with a stock like yours, isn’t there a possibility to uncheck notifications to RG agreements and just get notified about disagreement or first agreement?
4 Likes
100% agreed. But it is highly interesting. I recently got attacked by an expert for adding 5th IDs …
This thread helped me a lot to understand the preconceptions leading to attack an identifier for a correct identification.
8 Likes
No, you can’t turn it off, only turn off all agreements, which is not what we need.
1 Like
That’s a pity. Turning off the disagreements cannot be in anyones interest. Imo it is weird that this cannot be separated from the agreements. Has there been a feature request yet? (I guess so …)
I might be confused about what @fffffffff and you are talking about, but it looks like you’re discussing whether it’s possible to turn off notifications for identifications which are in agreement with your own.
This functionality was added quite awhile back, and has been very helpful for me (and I can only imagine it’s the same for folks with 10x the number of identifications that I have).
If you go to your account profile and the notifications settings there, you can turn off notifications for confirming IDs. (It doesn’t matter whether it’s a RG observation.)
I still get notifications when someone adds an ID that isn’t the same as mine, even if it’s not a disagreement. For example, with most mammals I don’t identify to subspecies. There are some folks who are pretty committed to adding mammal subspecies and sometimes I get a bunch of notifications when one of them goes through and does so for a bunch of seals (or whales, etc.).
Turning off notifications for confirming IDs probably wouldn’t make as much of a difference if someone is working mostly with Unknown/Life observations and giving them an initial ID at a high taxonomic level. In this situation, any subsequent lower level ID would generate a notification.
It is possible to unfollow any observation, which means you shouldn’t get any notifications from it. This can be done while on the observation page (which wouldn’t be practical for large volumes) and also from the identify interface. The latter would be more efficient, but there’s no keyboard shortcut for it that I can see, so it would still be on the slow side to unfollow large numbers of observations (if you weren’t interested in seeing the refinements after putting something in Insecta, for example).
6 Likes
It seemed to take a few days before it worked right - I missed some disagreeing ID’s when I first turned it on, i swear! but at this point it is well settled in and wonderful to only get notifications of comments, differeing ID’s, and tags. As someone who goes through hundreds of observations regularly, it saves me xD
2 Likes
No, this isn’t what we talk about, I need first agreements, I don’t need 5th ones, I can’t turn them off, there’s no such functionality today. And why would we want to unfollow our own observations? There’re more things that can happen.
1 Like
I also want to see WHO agrees with me … till I am either satisfied, or lost interest, then I unfollow.
Thanks for the clarification.
I think since the topic of this discussion thread is about identifiers/identifications, I was primed to understand you to be talking about observations you put identifications on (for other people), rather than observations of your own.
Given the way I use iNaturalist, I wouldn’t have thought of the idea that a first confirmation one one’s own observation would be helpful to see, but not subsequent ones. I appreciate hearing from others such as yourself who have different approaches.
I’m sure many (maybe most) folks use iNaturalist differently than I do, so have different thoughts about this.
To share more fully where my approach; I typically make a few thousand observations a year, and over 95% of them are from a limited geographic area (~15mi radius circle) in a northern latitude with limited diversity. As a result, I am frequently making observations of species I’m already familiar with.
I rarely put a species name on an observation unless I’m reasonably confident, so I will see a notification for any refinements on my coarse IDs. These are what I’m most interested in seeing. For ones where I do put a species name but am not entirely sure about, I occasionally go through and check for Research Grade observations, then see who agreed with me (a follow up thought on this below).
Given this, for the a big majority of my observations, agreements are not very important to me. Even getting only first agreements would result in a lot more notifications than I would want to go through.
On a separate note, I’m curious how others think about IDs from people they have more or less confidence in. @DianaStuder mentioned wanting to know who agrees, and then at some point being satisfied (presumably if/when enough people who seem reliable have agreed).
For me, there are certainly people I feel more confident in, and others much less confident. However, it doesn’t really change how I deal with a particular observation in practice. I think the effect it does have is on my confidence in my ability to identify a particular organism going forward. If I get an agreement from someone who I have confidence in, it will tend to increase my sense of confidence in my own ability to identify the organism. If I get an agreement from someone I have less confidence in, my own confidence doesn’t go up (and might even go down a little bit sometimes).
2 Likes
And beyond quaification: if there are no disagreements, why add yet another ID? Unless: the first two came from the clueless…