Photo Bounties: Good Incentive or Dumb Idea?

Not sure. The denouement happened after the conference, and I don’t know the professor personally, so that wasn’t info I was given.

For Asilidae at least, really depends on the taxon. Some genera only have one species, some have relatively easy to identify species (from photos), and others have numerous similar species in which a specimen is best or required for ID. Another issue to keep in mind is lack of expertise. Us robber fly folks on iNaturalist know particularly groups fairly well, but pretty much no one person knows all the species in every region. Also identification keys are lacking for many groups and the taxonomy in some cases is extremely confused. So many factors, most not doing with the flies themselves.

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Interesting, thanks! I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for any robber flies I see, and pay more attention to flies in general

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99% of the replies so far have been some variation of: incentives will result in bad data and/or behavior, or it wouldn’t incentivize me because I’m a hobbyist. I think most of us are rejecting the idea out of hand, and maybe we are making some assumptions about the premise, and not thinking creatively.

The main issues people are discussing are credibility and accountability. There are plenty of ways paying work gets crowdsourced on the internet. If it didn’t work, platforms like Airbnb or Fiverr wouldn’t function. The way they function is by requiring users to establish an identity, and establishing feedback mechanisms to weed out bad behavior. iNat has the former, and a little bit of the latter, through flagging and banning procedures, but it is designed expecting mostly good faith behavior, because there isn’t much of a reason for bad faith behavior on a platform that doesn’t reward you. And it is easy to create new identities on iNat, so banning is a deterrent, and not absolute protection. This is why everyone is getting squeamish. Shifting the premise of the platform would change the nature of the platform entirely.

However, that isn’t to say your vision is without merit @Myelaphus ! The question is whether iNat is the platform to achieve what you want. @tiwane commented that he is philosophically against offering rewards, but I assume he was talking about on iNat, because we offer rewards for science all the time. It’s called a job. It used to not exist, because science was mainly in the domain of people with financial independence, but over time, it became a paying profession. We know there is a market out there for biological data and samples. We also know that the availability of the market is limited to scattered websites and professional relationships. Maybe there is an idea here for another platform that opens up the market and has the same quality control methods used by businesses across the internet.

Regarding whether anyone would be interested in searching for obscure bounties, maybe not for a single species and a modest reward. However, if the platform accumulated a variety of objectives, and someone could sign up for a number of them, it would be more likely to stimulate a response. One could imagine a wolverine photo objective stimulating the deployment of camera traps by people who would never have previously cared about wildlife or science. Or botanical objectives stimulating field trips that would not have happened otherwise.

I reject the notion that money is not a key element to stimulate people. As someone “outside” the science/conservation system, if I could do field work and pay the bills, my life would look very different.

I think there is a kernel of an idea here. I agree with the implied sentiment that iNat is not the proper tool for this, but that doesn’t make it a “dumb idea”.

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what’s the species and where is it found?
have you asked dipterists or iNatters in area already?

personally, if there was anything rare someone wanted me to hunt down I would anyway be excited to help… but if it was in a place which was costly in terms of travel even for nearby recorders, I think that it could make sense to reimburse.

I can’t imagine anyone who is a serious recorder here or elsewhere would fake the find … but maybe I’m terribly naive haha

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After taking the photo he could sell the snake and get most of his money back.

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