I don’t know, everybody - I’m seeing a lot of comments expressing various levels of frustration. The copyright violations, sock-puppetry, falsified data and bad-faith users, failure to mark specimens as cultivated, newer users who don’t know how to do things, random weird stuff, etc.
And don’t get me wrong, I understand!
But personally? I think all of this is fun. Even - perhaps especially - the problems. The influx of observations that’s difficult to keep up with, the crazy amount of flags - everything.
I’m not saying all of this is necessarily sustainable year-round, that we couldn’t use more infrastructure in certain places, or that there aren’t areas for improvement.
But watching how things break a little bit, and seeing whether we can fix them? What a treat! There are so many things to do - an enjoyable collective effort to push back against the deluge.
And really, even the small minority of folks not behaving on iNaturalist quite how we’d like them to are engaging with the natural world. How cool.
This place always emerges out of these things far more awesome than before. And if it ever doesn’t - well, we tried, didn’t we? City Nature Challenge is amazing, and so is iNaturalist.
Myself, I can’t wait to see what happens next year.
I appreciate your optimism and good cheer, but I simply can’t muster any myself. iNat has been my only refuge from an ever more horrifying and out-of-control reality, and feeling like it’s being overrun with behavior I hate and cannot control has had an excessively large impact on my mental health. I know I should just log off and avoid the place for a week or two until it settles down again, but the offline world is worse.
Like @graysquirrel said, it’s great that you can see the silver lining/positive side of things, but with all due respect I don’t think this is a good read of the room. Many users (both from the relatively small, selective pool of forum users, plus others not using the forum that I have talked to) are mentally drained by the events of the last week or so, including some to the point of considering quitting iNat, taking a break, or significantly scaling back their contributions.
I personally do not find the incredible deluge of
copyright violations, sock-puppetry, falsified data and bad-faith users, failure to mark specimens as cultivated
in such a concentrated period any fun in any way whatsoever. They are tedious and exhausting to deal with.
I don’t think
is really an accurate characterisation, given many of these users will almost certainly never touch or think about iNaturalist again, and will probably not consider the natural world any differently than they did before the event.
I’m with you here, my friend! For better or worse, a fair bit of my incessant ID’ing is probably a way of trying to cope with all that.
Oh, I don’t know. iNat was even mentioned during that murder trial this week - we’re everywhere! They will think of us again! (Non-threateningly pounding my fist).
I understand that position (I think; hopefully). And it’s definitely a concern! Also, it’s absolutely fair to take a break any time one is mentally drained - especially considering, you know, we’re all basically only here because we want to be. It’s difficult for many of us to not get emotionally caught up in some of these things, because we’re so invested.
But iNaturalist is a good experiment; City Nature Challenge is a good experiment.
To the extent anybody would like a pep talk:
This place is going to be okay! You’re going to be okay! There are so many cool things going on! The problems will be solved! We can do this!***
***Offer valid only on iNaturalist. Certain restrictions apply.
Oh but you can - do it all again - for the Great Southern Bioblitz - cannot find the date - September for 2025?
PS I have been deliberately focusing on ‘my preferred way’ to ID first.
Catching placeholders.
Considering Geomodel anomalies.
Kingdom or plant disagreements.
Using DQA for Not a Single Subject.
Problems where I still hope that iNat will bring us better solutions.
Obvious duplicates - uploaded in error? Checksum is apparently a possibility for that?
‘One’ obs where each picture is uploaded as a separate obs. (Please combine - then list obs numbers - is grudge work, but it has to be done when I come across them)
Failure to mark as Cultivated - still waits for iNat to spilt Not Wild from Needs ID. That is a design flaw against both observers who want an ID, and identifiers who want to focus on iNat’s Wild By Definition.
For sock puppet gangs - who I haven’t met this! year - use Can Be Improved to push back against RG.
Frankly - we have 2 days left - if you are not worth my time and effort - you WILL be Marked as Reviewed and abandoned.
I had no prior knowledge of these events, and was surprised when my dashboard was filled with observations of species I was following. At first, I was actually happy, I said inaturalist is becoming widespread.
But then I was discouraged when I saw that the observations in the “unknown” status had doubled.
Well, maybe i need to work a bit harder for a while.
Hear, hear, to those who can’t dredge up a positive outlook from the inundated depths of the results of this City Nature Challenge. I especially sympathise with @graysquirrel in that iNaturalist is so often a sanctuary for me, but CNC-related fraud and ignorance manage to puncture the peace like a current through the levee.
I’m having a fairly bad year (both calendar-2025 and the last 12 months); the world news gets worse all the time; and now, although problems have always existed on iNaturalist, most of those are overshadowed by a downpour of terrible observer behaviour, data-contaminating stolen photos, copied observations… the list goes on. I suppose if I’m disgruntled with the handling of the CNC for example, then as also mentioned above, I should really just not engage – to not give my efforts as a volunteer and see how far that goes. I’m not impressed with the limp post-hoc efforts to clear out things that could have been (at least a little) filtered from the start. Evidently what’s more important to organiser and institution are the overjoy at how enormous the numbers can get (millions of observations! hundreds of new observers!) and the indifference to the quality of those numbers (thousands of fraudulent records! a huge chunk of observers who abandon iNaturalist as soon as the boring assignment is over!).
Can I also be delighted that the “number go up”, as the meme goes? Can I be chuffed that the system has to be fixed painstakingly by volunteers, only to go underwater again in one year’s time, as so many sandbags piled up on the shores of a river? Can one grow to enjoy “pushing back against the deluge” without ever having the hope of a future point when it ends? I’m not being sarcastic; I genuinely don’t know. I’m exhausted online and off, and these online nature pastimes seem to take a watery chunk out of my waking hours even as they lose their inviting quality. Perhaps now that the CNC is over, I could choose to be pleased that although I’m waist-deep in the turbid water of unreviewed problem records, at least it has stopped raining.
Alternatively, let’s hope the flood recedes along my compulsion to post with enormous cynicism to the iNaturalist Forum. Still, I think it’s a bit much to say of this whole challenge (their word, not mine) that it’s a “good experiment”; it’s an experiment, like any, and that’s fine, but neither good nor bad except judged by what we learn from it. And I’ve certainly learned something!
We have had 4 days of wildfire on our mountain. About 3000 hectares burnt. Yesterday I drove home across Silvermine. Saw a raptor perched on a rock … waiting for mice. And the Silver Mine for which it is named is exposed now the surrounding shrubs have burnt away.
Sad to look at obs from only days ago - and see that landscape bare and black.
But we are heading into our rainy winter, and then we see the fire flowers.
I tried to log off for a few days/weeks in previous years.
I maybe should have logged off this year, but instead I flagged over a dozen pages of copyright infringement. And plenty of other people, including you, flagged another 80 pages of copyright flags. And each page is 50 flags, so we are talking more than 5,000 cases of copyright infringement.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this leads to more identifier burnout on iNaturalist.
Anyways, I am going to try to log off and go attack some invasive bushes for a while if the rain stops.
Maybe for those who are distressed by the massive influx of bad iNat observations, do what I’ve done when it comes to the massive influx of bad news on the web, TV, radio, etc. … tune it all out. Disconnect to whatever degree is necessary. Focus on what you enjoy and what you can control. It’s done wonders for my mental health.
I’ve been following the frustration threads, but I can’t really participate in them. I’m not seeing that in Team Coastal NC. After reviewing all the “Needs ID” observations in the project, I went back and reviewed the “Research Grade” and “Casual” observations, too, to add third IDs in some cases, and mainly to check for erroneous RGs and DQAs. It is amazing to me that such a vast area spanning so many counties – essentialy the entire North Carolina Coast and Coastal Plain – has few enough CNC observations that I can keep up. And I know that people have been going out specifically to look for the iconic and unusual, because I’ve seen a plethora of Venus flytraps and yellow pitcher plants out of all proportion to their relative abundance in the region.
I’m very thankful that Long Island(Brooklyn/Queens) had no plant observations that I needed to flag. I ID’ed around 4000 observations and this really brought me back into Inat after a long hiatus.
