Diana, I appreciate your presence on the forum. You’re actually the forum member that I’ve given the most likes to! So please know that this isn’t meant as a correction; it’s just a small clarification, because these ideas are closely related, but they are a tiny bit different.
Lurk. Is an odd word to choose (and yes I know it is not the word you chose), for people who do not visibly engage. Don’t come into the shop if you are not going to buy something ? Reading along, not commenting if you have ‘nothing to add’ is not lurking, that’s just life.
Try this. Take this thread. We have … 31 comments, 26 users. But 261 likes and 810 views = mostly lurkers. They are reading along and getting on with their life.
PS - those user numbers apply to the thread these comments were carved out from.
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I think you’re using “lurk” as if it has a negative connotation, when really “lurk” and “observe” are basically synonyms. What is a non-participant doing if not observing without making themselves known? Maybe you’re getting it confused with “loiter,” which does imply that they’re gaining nothing from being present, but usually “lurking” in the contexts I’ve heard it offline imply that someone is intentionally gaining information without being noticed or acknowledged by the people providing the information
Actually, “lurk” does have negative connotations, but not extremely negative.
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Lurk and observe are not at all similar. Are you confusing lurk with look?
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Does that mean you would like every single person who looks at this thread - to leave a comment - thanks for sharing - great pics - SO interesting - learnt a lot.
Really ? wow. Include me out.
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Am I crazy? I just said I don’t think lurk should have a negative connotation, which means the definition I provided isn’t a negative action. Why would I want people not to lurk when I JUST said lurking isn’t bad? I just gave the definition I have of the word based on my offline encounters with it
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I moved the posts above to their own topic.
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Although not aimed at ‘citizen science’ platforms specifically, a paper by J. Bishop (2011) “Transforming lurkers into posters: The role of the participation continuum” hints at a variety of reasons for lurking. “Social phobia”, “flame-wars”, or insufficient “support for usability and sociability”… among other things.
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We may be talking at cross purposes ? Lost in translation. Nothing against you personally. Lurk has connotations of criminal intention - a mugger lurking in a dark alley. It is not a neutral word.
But it is the word that social media uses to condemn engagement which is not ‘stand up and be counted’ In the same way that businesses want your email so they can hurl ads at you. Part of the click-bait side of social media. And the trail of cookies that follows us from site to site.
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i think lurk simply has multiple meanings, depending on context. a mugger lurks in an alley, and a person reading a forum thread without replying lurks as well.
and honestly i mostly associate it with the second use, which i don’t interpret with a negative connotation. probably a cultural/generation difference indeed, but i don’t think it’s fair for multiple people to jump on squidtk for using the term and defining their usage appropriately on an online forum. kind of surprising to see from people who are active internet community members.
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but what would you like every single (silent) reader to do ? We are encouraged to use the hearts, instead of adding just my 2 cents till we have dollars of two cents.
@GeolTel I skimmed that paper; thanks for sharing it.
I think the issue in this discussion is the last bit: “for evil purposes”.
Lurking is an appropriate term, because these people are hiding, and watching everything that’s going on, and you don’t know that they’re there.
Even in this thread, out of eight users who commented, 50% of them are hiding (no name, no face pic, etc.).
Based on the paper, I think lurkers are generally scared to engage. Lurking is based on fear of judgment. I don’t blame them! I have shared things authentically, trying to be helpful, and been attacked and ridiculed on this forum.
Other times, I have something that I want to share, but I don’t share it, because I don’t want to deal with the blowback. I could handle it, but it’s not a productive activity. So maybe in that moment, I am a lurker.
Even though iNat is “the nicest place on the internet”, according to some people. I can’t blame people who don’t want to deal with that.
Depending on the particular forum, quite possibly continue doing exactly what they are doing: silently reading along. “Lurking” in internet-speak is not necessarily negative, merely a descriptor of a specific mode of engagement.
I’ve been on some discussion forums where users are explicitly encouraged to lurk/read silently for a while before posting in order to become familiar with the forum culture and lingo and avoid asking questions that have already been asked dozens of times. Sometimes these forums have like buttons that people can use to participate without posting, sometimes they don’t.
I’ve also been on some discussion forums where lurking is explicitly discouraged and there may be rules that limit the content available to non-active users. This is most common in contexts where users are sharing potentially sensitive personal reflections or artistic creations and there is concern about this being exploited (e.g. many people consuming content without giving back in some way – sort of the same situation we risk having on iNat if we end up with too many observers and too few identifiers). On the forums I’ve been on that have some mechanism for requiring participation for full access to content, this is generally accompanied by a certain amount of grumbling and it isn’t always clear whether such mechanisms address the imbalance effectively. (Again, one might draw possible parallels with iNat.)
Lurking need not be about being afraid to engage or not wanting to share. Some people may simply prefer to mostly read and post only occasionally, because they don’t have anything to contribute to the discussion that hasn’t already been said by someone else. I read the forums semi-regularly for several months before I made an account, and the only reason I didn’t continue to quietly read along indefinitely as I had been doing was because there was a situation that was causing some major disruptions and confusion which I could offer an explanation for (a highly prolific identifier in my region who had deleted their account). Now, after posting that first time, it seems I never shut up again, which depending on one’s point of view may or may not be an improvement for the community compared to if I had gone back to lurking quietly (e.g., it would likely mean fewer long-winded analyses like this one.)
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that ‘you don’t know they are there’ is on you.
I will remind you all that the forum is public. It feels as if we are chatting among ourselves - but unless it is a private message, comments on obs or these threads are free for all. People don’t always have the time or inclination to visibly engage. And moderators know how much ‘engagement’ has to be pushed back !
I do not agree with that statement. If you are concerned about ‘hiding’ how many people use ‘nyms and profile pictures of … quite a few iNatters are ‘on the internet no one knows you are a dog 
My favourite dog is the author of the iNat Enhancement Suite - which I use constantly.
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There are at least two assumptions here with which I disagree but I do not feel motivated enough to type out a detailed itemization, which lack of motivation is coincidentally, sometimes (often?) my reason for reading but not posting.
Yawning unfearfully,
Lucy Cash ←- literally an iNat away, with photo even
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i am in favor of lurking. most people are lurking on the internet. it is the neutral thing.
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I could well be wrong, but I had a slightly different understanding of The Pareto Principle. The way we used it at work was to expect that we’d get 80% of our results from the first 20% percent of our labours and 20% of results from the next 80% of work. I don’t think anyone took the exact percentages seriously, but the underlying principle that there are diminishing returns to our labours was useful when considering exactly how much effort to put into any particular job. Some jobs have to be absolutely perfect and so you put 100% in regardless, some may not need such quality and you can drop your input levels accordingly. I guess for iNat we could think about how many photos are needed to get a good ID, will one do or do we need three or four or all twenty? Or how many IDs are needed to go research grade (though this is already established).
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Yes, I think in the big wide world you’re absolutely right. If, for example, I was lurking around your bins I don’t imagine you’d be very happy about it. On much of the internet though it’s well established as a term for someone who looks and reads but doesn’t post or write and it doesn’t carry those same negative connotations. When I’m not posting on here, I have a role as the moderator on another website, nothing to do with nature, it’s for a football club. We even had a member who was so taken with the idea that they chose Lurker as their username. It was always a pleasant surprise when he posted anything.
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This sounds more familiar to me. Pareto efficiency is a concept in economics as well (which is where I know the principle from, at least in terms of maximization and diminishing returns).
In terms of participation in groups - I’m more familiar with the rule of thirds - a third of folks do a lot, a third do average, and a third do little to nothing. But again, this is an assumption based in certain experiences.
Generally, I find this entire discussion to be a bit in the diminishing returns category - not sure what the point is. This forum is optional, and is biased toward English speaking people (there are Spanish versions of some of the categories to be fair) with consistent internet access and enough extra time to spare to discuss…..whatever it is we are actually discussing
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