i mean, i think a full enforcement of the anti harassment guidelines would go a long way towards making blocking not necessary, but unfortunately that isn’t always how it works out. You can’t have it both ways. You either have toxic sites like twitter, where anyone can block anyone, and for good reason because people are allowed to be horrible, or you have a more regulated community science site where blocking is rare, but people actually face consequences for harassing others, even if they have high social status in the ‘scientific community’. Ultimately though, the root problem isn’t that iNat admin likes harassment, it is that they have absolutely nowhere near the staffing to actually enforce the rules as they are written. Delegating to volunteers has caused a lot of problems especially since taxonomic curation and site moderation are included within one curator umbrella, two very different things that require very different skills. The result has been inability to control harassment plus certain taxonomic viewpoints running rampant at the expense of others. More specifically, the rules are laid out in a specific way but are not enforced specifically and consistently and literally, and that creates a uniquely difficult situation in a community that i estimate is something around 50% neurodivergent (mostly autistic and adhd), mostly undiagnosed, and we don’t do well with poorly defined or inconsistent rules and guidelines. I don’t see it getting better unless iNat gets substantially more staffing to devote to this. It’s known that i have not always agreed with how iNat staff deal with these matters, but in reality i recognize they really do work very hard to do the very best they can, but there is just too few of them, and really, several more full time paid staff with a skill set completely oriented towards managing humans are needed to make any progress with this.
Given that being the case, i just think we have to accept that blocks will degrade data quality a bit, because the alternative is allowing people to be harassed until they leave the site or feel unsafe, which isn’t ok. That already happens elsewhere in the scientific community and it’s not something we want more of here.
I don’t think people should block over taxonomic or data quality disagreements. However, i think that this factor being the sole reason for blocking is less common than being portrayed here. Often the disagreeing ID comes with other, more um, disagreeable behavior. I don’t think i’ve been blocked much if at all, if you see it one or two times, the other person is probably the problem, but if you are getting blocked by dozens of people consider that your approach to disagreeing may not be right as well.