Anything that lends itself to generating a leaderboard of some kind (“I have more useful/pretty/scientifically accurate observations than you”) will be gamed and exploited. Maybe that is wanted, I don’t know. I’d love to see the existing leaderboards go.
More helpful for the purpose of actually spreading knowledge would be to have a way to annotate photos with diagnostically relevant details. Or if you do want to reward people for lots of good contributions, a low-volume way to publicly acknowledge excellent user behavior could be a good idea.
Also, this stuck out to me:
Identifiers are users, and users are identifiers. That’s what’s so great about iNaturalist – it gnaws at the ivory tower, erodes the whole professor vs. student relationship. If something helps identifiers, it helps everyone, and if it helps users, it helps everyone. It’s the same thing!