True! Although honestly that would be a pretty good comeback… lol.
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I will try. Thank you. :)
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I agree that folks should assume good intent by default. That being said, there are many cultural nuances to what will and won’t read as “insulting.”
In education especially, there’s a delicate balance between overestimating and underestimating knowledge. With no further context or social cues, being told a statement of fact is often understood as “you obviously didn’t know this” or “you should have known this.” This is more likely to trigger embarrassment and defensiveness, especially among beginners or when the comment is in a public forum.
Personally, I try to compensate for this by proactively communicating that I’m assuming good intent on the learner’s part as well. Instead of “This is wrong because xyz,” I try to frame it as “I understand how you got this answer. Here’s the part that you might have missed.”
Human communication, after all, is a science in and of itself :)
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Thanks for the link - that’s an interesting paper, especially for anyone involved in community science projects.
I used to try to “cushion” factual statements with an intro like “Counterintuitively…” or “This would seem to be the logical choice, but…”, but that seemed to provoke more negative responses. It’s interesting that I’ve had the least friction when I use completely telegraphic style (e.g. "pronotum relatively broad; elytra with raised carina). Just nothing to get mad about there, I guess!
The user who called me condescending also routinely makes snarky comments to anyone adding a higher-level ID, even when it’s an agreeing one, and is hostile to any and all disagreeing IDs. They’ve definitely made my “don’t bother” list–which is extremely short, a testament to what a nice community iNat is, in general!
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Thank you for all the thought you put into your careful replies! It’s very kind of you to think of how your words will be received.
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We live a world where some people are pedantic gatekeepers who condemn anyone for not being as fanatically dedicated to their chosen hobby as they are.
Ignore these people.
Hobbies are for having FUN. No one is paying you on here, so you are not a Professional. You are giving your time and energy to offer FREE information. Tell anyone who wants to complain about the quality of the FREE information you are submitting to go pound sand.
JMHO
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Yes, I should have a shortcut to this chat on standby. :)
Don’t stop identifying. Most people appreciate coarse IDs. Try to ignore those that don’t. Currently, many people are celebrating Christmas and New Year. Some identifiers have vacation and more time for IDs and in my experience there is a little increase in the amount of IDs. Of course IDs vary, some go through unknowns, some are searching for mavericks, there are even some that just add an additional ID to research and casual grade observation, etc. I do understand that some people then get annoyed by an increase of notifications, but neither getting IDs nor notifications is a good reason to lose temper.
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I have not read each and every comment but to add what I hope is a different perspective: some new users probably expect to get a ‘photo match’ id as is possible with Google Lens - these are the ones that will be surprised and probably disappointed to see ‘Mammal’ as the id: it’s easier to excuse a less polite comment in that light.
Without helpful comments on what to take a photo of and even hints how to do it and explanations on what the id is based on, links to resources, I wouldn’t learned a fraction what I know today. I needed Google for a while just to understand the terms used.
I started adding some observations that I do not want identified, simply because they are incomplete. I added to the comments “Placeholder. More photos coming”.
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Unfortunately some reviewers don’t see or heed comments, and sometimes they will ID while you’re still editing your submission. Especially with bird records.
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@lrussoutk I only added about 20k IDs so far and didn’t yet get angry comments, maybe because I concentrate on old observations.
My approch is to start with something like https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/identify?quality_grade=needs_id%2Ccasual&iconic_taxa=unknown&order=asc&photos=true&created_on=2023-06-09&createdDateType=exact
(order=asc helps everywhere I think)
I pick the few things on the page that I can ID coarsely), when done I click “mark all as reviewed” to never see the rest again (mostly weeds and trees - there are IDers whose workflow is disturbed by someone else IDing unknown weeds as “plants” and I’m too lazy to look if I’m in their region), then press Ctrl-r to get the next batch. Once that day is done, I increment the date (this happens once every few weeks).
Before I start working I click on the red bubble in the top right corner next to my profile image and middle-click all items in the menu that appears. With each of the new pages, I look for disagreements (in all cases except one so far I had been wrong) and withdraw my error. If my ID has been refined, I unfollow the observation.
Then I go to the observations of the observer of the item because that page usually has a much higher density of unknowns than the generic URL I mentioned above, and work there (again order=asc, and check the box for “Casual”, and ignore very recent observations).
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IT’s so helpful! We need more people willing to haul unknowns out of the pile and into the right categories!
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I saw https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/260353636 a few days ago and identified it as a cockroach. Soon after, someone who IDs lots of cockroaches came by and identified it more specifically.
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I have only recently gotten up the courage to venture into the realm of identifying unknowns, which I mostly do as a break from all the thousands of pages of “Needs ID” plants in New England, my usual stomping grounds.
I find it fascinating to see all the truly bizarre stuff that is out there, most of which I make no effort to identify, because I know absolutely nothing about squishy blobs, brown specks, or mysterious translucent spheres.
What makes it rewarding are the times when I’ve taken old observations (months or even years) from Unknown to genus or species, and then had them quickly taken to RG by other identifiers.
Is there a way that people are filtering for observations that have recently moved out of unknown?
My favorites are the ones with really clear photos of easily identifiable species that even an avowed plant person like myself can recognize, like a Yellow Garden Spider, Common Garter Snake, or Eastern Newt, all of which I recently found.
Sometimes I almost think observations like that are planted, as a rewarding stimulus to keep us coming back for more…
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It’s possible that such observations show up for people who are subscribed to a taxon, but this isn’t a function I have used.
I do know that some identifiers manage to keep up with certain taxa to the extent that they have either reviewed all “needs ID” observations and merely need to check every few days to catch any that have newly appeared in the pile (e.g., honeybees in Europe), or they sort oldest first so that the now-no-longer-unknowns end up at the front of their list.
There is also a filter in Identify for “recently updated” that some people may be using.
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Taxon specialists have their filters set - if your ID moves it to what their filter catches … success!!
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I spent some time trying to identify unknowns, but I got enough hostility, up to the point of being blocked by a prolific uploader of unknowns, that I’ve just given up on it. I tried both explaining why I was giving a coarse ID (mostly using the iNaturalist template response), and “silent” coarse IDs, and both of them seem to get backlash.
It’s easier to sit back and blast away agreements to a hundred clear observations of Western Sword Fern (and people even say thank you!) than it is to try to make judicious high-level identifications of Unknowns only to have people clap back telling me to mind my own business because they see their iNat as their private journal; that my ID is useless if it’s not to species/genus/family; or that I’m ignorant and wrong in my ID, only to provide a narrower ID that actually does fall under my higher-level ID and actually proves me right.
I understand that it’s helpful in aggregate and a good practice, but I don’t feel like I have a leg to stand on when confronted with this hostility, particularly when people express the suspicion that unknowns are more likely to get ID’ed to species than things sitting in “dicot” or “agaricales” or what have you. We don’t see data on the flow rates of observations from Unknown to species - if we could point at numbers and say “look, moving it from Unknown to Order increases its chances of a species ID by 30%”, I’d be happy to just paste that and let them sit with the facts. But right now it feels like we just rely on common sense to assume that it actually helps, and while I’m inclined to agree, I don’t feel I can make that case to people who are angry about receiving IDs above genus level. I don’t even feel I can make that case to myself anymore, even though I believe it to be true in the absence of evidence, which makes it harder to just power through.
Broadly, I think this also connects with a larger issue that iNaturalist has of not making its purpose and norms clear to new users.
Maybe someday I’ll have a go at Unknowns again, but right now I don’t think the platform does a good job of addressing the social conflict that often comes with that, and I want iNaturalist to be a place where I and others can enjoy, appreciate, and better understand nature, not a battlefield where I’m constantly on guard against possible hostility, or tiptoeing through a social minefield.
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I do more annotations than IDs. Those are helpful to many iNat users and I’ve gotten no backlash.
I’m sorry you’ve been treated poorly. I do believe the majority of users are decent people.
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I am sure you have plenty of legs to stand on and much moral support from other iNaturalist users. If people don’t appreciate what you are doing, just point them at the Getting Started section as they clearly don’t understand what iNaturalist is about, and give them links to a couple of the numerous forum discussions on why it is useful to give coarse ids. You don’t need to take their hostility on the chin.
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