Rampant guessing of IDs

[charlie]

@marina_gorbunova

But most of users on iNat do 1-10 observations and never come back or add random id to someone else’s observation and leave, they don’t spend enough time to “acclimatise”, nor they really want it as they check and go (which can be their problem or app/website problem). From earlier staff posts we saw that half of accounts are just blank ones.
We can’t just turn the blind eye on a problem, as we do now, we need experts and their effort, they also need a reason to stick on the site, if we just say “hey, it’s gonna be filtered anyway, so why care?” problem will stay forever while it is actually solvable.

my experience over this past decade on iNat is if someone tries it and doesn’t get into it, there’s no real point in prodding them. Most valuable content comes from power observers and power ID’ers and for others the site really is more of an outreach and education tool. Likewise many ‘duress users’ add content when assigned for a class, but they too leave and never curate their data, creating a headache for us when it’s a large or repeating class. For ‘experts’ who try iNat (or don’t try iNat) then disengage and gripe, they aren’t going to do any different no matter what is done, the only thing that changes their behavior is if others around them use it and talk about it. (to be honest i think most ‘experts’ who dislike iNat dislike it because there isn’t the power and privelige structure they have around them in universities, they are called out on mistakes and normal unwashed amateurs can challenge them and they don’t like that) I think it would be interesting to create a separate portal and different functionality for us power users, but classifying who is or isn’t a power user could be tricky too.