I personally think that far too many species are obscured on iNaturalist. This is frustrating because if an observation is obscured when it does not need to be, this can often cause more harm than good. But today I specifically want to talk about obscured birds. iNat seems to auto-obscure A LOT of different birds. Most of them have no need to need to be obscured, bu also, there is no point in obscuring them. Let me explain. Here in Wisconsin, American Black Duck is obscured (see https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/39432869). While you may not know from this observation where it was taken, I could just go over to the eBird map (https://ebird.org/map/ambduc?neg=true&env.minX=&env.minY=&env.maxX=&env.maxY=&zh=false&gp=false&ev=Z&mr=1-12&bmo=1&emo=12&yr=all&byr=1900&eyr=2020) and see every sighting of the species in the area - so if I was looking for American Black Duck and I couldn’t see where it was on iNat, eBird could still show me exactly where American Black Ducks are.
So really, as long as eBird exists, iNat has no reason to obscure bird species other than those that are hidden in eBird (https://support.ebird.org/en/support/solutions/articles/48000803210-sensitive-species-in-ebird). I personally think that we should follow eBird and obscure ONLY those bird populations hidden there, and possibly a few others if we fell there is a good reason to.
Thoughts?