I know many people on here are professionals but I am a very casual observer just trying to learn a little more about the world around me. I’m curious what the established site etiquette is around just sharing my enthusiasm and delight for an observation. It seems like comments are used solely for ID and I don’t want to clutter them up. I don’t want to bother anyone with a direct message (would it be bothersome?). Do I make a forum post and link the observation? Is this sort of thing kind of beyond the scope of the site and I simply link this observation to my friends and go “look at this creature it’s so beautiful I didn’t know this lived near me” in private?
In my opinion, I don’t think sharing your love for someone’s observation is bothersome at all. As long as you aren’t spamming them, many people will enjoy a comment complimenting their observation! There’s also an option to fave their observation if you especially like it. Feel free to share your appreciation!
(And for the record this was inspired by an observation of Eastern Emerald Elysia. I didn’t know something like this existed in my neck of the proverbial woods, what a lovely creature!)
Sharing enthusiasm for observations is great, and many observers do exactly that here. In fact, there are entire discussions on this forum devoted to it in one way or another. See Your best photos of the week!, for example. While looking at that one and some of the others in the Nature Talk category, you’ll become familiar with how people share their enthusiasm for nature here, and you can do it too!
I add comments complimenting an observation all the time, never got a negative response. I suppose if it starts becoming an extended discussion it might be better to go to DMs to avoid giving all identifiers on the obs a notification for each message, but otherwise I’d say go for it.
I know it’s not allowed to link other people’s obs in the forum to criticize or call them out for something but as far as I know it’s fine to link them in a positive way.
Personally, I love it when somebody says “Nice photo!” or “It’s so cool that you saw that there!” or similar…it often makes my day, or at least makes me smile.
Likewise, I do not tend to hold back when I’m excited about someone’s photo or a neat find. In a world so frequently full of awfulness, why not share some positive energy? We could all use it, and it doesn’t cost much
I comment similar things to what you suggest all the time. Sometimes the comments don’t get a response, but most of the time I get someone who says thank you (for compliments) or is more than excited to share more about their observation. Even as professionals, we love the beautiful little creatures!! I also appreciate good photography, so I’ll often comment something along the lines of “This is a really great photograph!” or if we’ve got a case of the Particularly Adorable, I’ll comment about that too.
If I’m looking to have a private discussion (longer question/discussion, ask for permission to use their photos in something, etc.) I’ll DM people instead of asking everything in comments, but I will also comment to let them know I sent a message. It’s not really an etiquette thing as it is a notifications thing. The reason for this is, if folks only use the app, they don’t see DM notifications, so commenting & tagging them alerts them (as their notification settings allow) to log into the web version to check their DMs. I’ll usually say something like “This is a great photo! I’ve sent you a message about this observation” and I’ll link their observation in the title of the DM.
There are Community Guidelines on iNaturalist which cover some tone and attitude etiquette, but I think most users abide by this fairly well if they are already generally polite people.
I went to go look at who this little creature was. I had no idea this little guy existed! I love them already.
And after writing this, I saw that they also exist in my region?? So cool!
In my opinion, cluttering up the comments isn’t really a problem. The problem is that your comment is going to generate a notification to anyone who is subscribed to the observation you are commenting on. The people on iNat who do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of identification end up being subscribed to thousands of different observations. The notification system on iNat kinda sucks, and if you get more than a dozen notifications in a day, it’s easy to lose track of them. For someone doing a lot of identification work, those notifications can be critical to their work - they might contain responses to questions, or disagreeing identifications, etc. I hate to be a grinch, but it can be kinda frustrating to have mission critical notifications pushed way down the stack by a bunch of notifications for comments like “nice photo” or “cool observation”. It doesn’t really happen to me much (thankfully), but I can imagine it can be an issue for other identifiers.
Hopefully, iNat will some day address some of the shortcomings of the notification system, and this will become less of a concern.
