Separate 'Like' and 'Bookmark' buttons

This sounds like a good idea at first, but I can think of some major reservations I have about it.

The “like” feature that is virtually ubiquitous on mainstream social networks these days may serve some potentially not-so-savory purposes, and some of these purposes may actually be the primary motivator behind the implementation of likes. I think it can be a form of social engineering that has some undesirable effects.

Likes are seen as a low-commitment form of engagement, so I think the amount of likes generated would probably be much higher than the amount of people using the star feature, and for this reason I think it would be important to think carefully about the effects it could have.

Likes typically result in a notification back to the original user whose post was liked. If they did not, this behavior would be unexpected for the user initiating the like, and I generally recommend against avoiding things that defy established conventions of web design and user interface. But when a notification is sent, these notifications grab the original user’s attention. This has several effects:

  • It keeps the user on the site or app more and may make it more addictive. See this article for an explanation on how likes and notifications are directly related to addiction.
  • It leads the user to focus more on their posts that are getting more likes, because their attention in drawn repeatedly to them
  • It conditions users to compete for likes, try to post things that will generate more likes, etc.

All three of these goals are at odds with the ultimate purpose and mission of iNaturalist. We don’t want to keep people on the site or app more, we want to be encouraging people to go out and connect more with the natural world. We certainly don’t want to be fueling addiction. We also don’t want attention to be focused on a small number of popular observations, but rather, we want to distribute attention where it is needed or relevant: observations in need of identification, observation a person is specifically searching for for educational or ID purposes, etc.

The whole “ranking of observations” thing could also have unintended consequences. Our society already faces the problem that “ugly” and “inconspicuous” species get less attention with respect to conservation than “charismatic” or “pretty” species. It’s why everyone is about monarchs and other showy butterflies but moths get comparatively little attention, in spite of being as important ecologically. Similarly, people pay attention to pretty flowers but often ignore inconspicuous weedy plants or indistinct-looking trees and shrubs. A like system would facilitate the worsening of this already-problematic factor. I’d rather iNaturalist be designed in such a way to nudge things in the other direction…trying to draw people’s attention to less conspicuous and less “easily likeable” species.

Also there’s the information overload thing. In our society, people are already inundated with notifications on tons of websites. We don’t need more of these things.

I feel quite strongly that I would prefer us not to implement this feature, for all these reasons.

7 Likes

Since I “liked” this post, I have now been shamed into replying with text. Good work.

But yes, I tend to agree. Anything that hooks into part of observers’ and other general iNat. users’ psychology in a way that is essentially orthogonal to education should be avoided. It’s the same reason I have in the past called for getting rid of or at least hiding leaderboards.

4 Likes

I should probably first say that this is unlikely to be implemented, there isn’t much support for it on the iNat team. There are bookmark services you can use across platforms that could fulfill the bookmarking function. I do like the idea of being able to search observations you’re following, however.

I wanted to share my perspective on Faving and iNat, since I’ve been looking through faved observations almost every day for nearly four years now (for Observation of the Day). Right now about 288k verifiable observations have been faved, which is about 1.2% of all observations. So, a tiny fraction of all observations have been faved, and I bet a decent number of these were faved by users who were “bookmarking” them for later, in addition to students who like faving their own observations.

In my experience, a lot of observations with “pretty” photos are faved, and that’s great, but I think even more observations are faved because they show a cool/interesting interaction, or a new species to iNat, and a good number of them are of what most people would consider “ugly” organisms. Oftentimes the photos aren’t anything special, technically, it’s what observed that was special. That’s just the kind of stuff our community likes, which is awesome. And that even extends to our social media audience - the more popular Observations of the Day tend to be the “weird” organisms that aren’t conventionally thought of as pretty or cute. Things like lions, bears, and other generically popular organisms aren’t the biggest hit with the iNat crowd.

Finally, iNat doesn’t have an algorithm that automatically displays faved observations, and I think that is what really fuels the addictive and competitive aspects of platforms like Instagram (which I have personally stopped using) and Twitter. So I don’t see a major risk by keeping the fave function.

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I also use the like button as a bookmark, but I use it for it’s intended purpose as well. Observation favoriting, by the way, is a great tool in my opinion, and many of the interesting observations I have come across are because of it. The reason that I think a bookmark button would be super useful is that I only usually need the bookmark for a short time, but since it feels rude to un-fave an observation, I just leave the star, which begins cluttering my faves list a lot.

1 Like

I use a bookmark folder in the browser, and when I find I have spare time, i go back and chip away at that from the top down, deleting each bookmark once I have finished with it (first in, first out). Actually, I have a number of these folders, for different reasons. One is “useful for presentations”, and I go through that looking for relevant photos when I am doing a presentation to a group of people. I should add that I don’t present very often, but I would like to more in the future, so it is more getting ready for that, than actually doing it!

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But why use it for bookmarking? Just because iNat doesn’t provide a bookmark function doesnt mean it is right to use the fav button for that purpose. Use your browsers bookmark, or one of the many browser extensions designed for this purpose. I’d like to see the iNat T&Cs say that fav button should not be used for bookmarking. That won’t stop everyone from doing it, but it will at least discourage some ppl. I say this because when I sort by popular I want to see the obs that others have found interesting, not see a list of other people’s bookmarks.
I’d suggest this feature: when sorting by popular, have all those obs with 1 fav or more, appear at the top (in order of date uploaded, not number of favs), then all the 1 favs obs appear below these. This ‘1 fav zone’ is where the highest concentration of bookmarked as opposed to truly faved obs will be found.
(update: see kiwifergus comment below, one can already sort by favs, I had overlooked this feature.)

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You already can sort by most favs…

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Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, but this isn’t something we’ll be moving forward on, so I’m going to close the thread.