Just a reminder that it’s fine to talk about one’s own personal experiences, but we should avoid inferring/assuming what another user’s motivations, thoughts, feelings, etc. are.
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I have been blocked for DQA votes on “gray area” observations, which I know because users outright tell me I’m wrong before blocking me. Other times I have seen users adamantly stick with what I believe to be a wrong ID and block me soon after I leave my ID, I assume this was because they disagreed with my ID.
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For anyone else who became curious about this, see @joe_fish’s profile and journal post:
I’m surprised about the forum block.
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This topic should not be about specific incidents or users unless you want to discuss your own experience. Joe can have his forum account reinstated if he wants to, but as far as I can tell it’s not something he wants.
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Given how long some of my own observations have taken to get IDs, I tend to appreciate any IDs offered, even if I think that it’s wrong. Those people gave me an irrevocable gift of their time. And I can disagree with a comment to elaborate if necessary.
It seems over-the-top to suggest that a query would “defeat the purpose” of blocking. Blocking should primarily be viewed as existing to prevent direct and repetitive harassment. If feelings are given weight, perhaps any personal psychological “discomfort” potentially faced by someone who initiates the block ought be weighted against the potential “impact [to] the psychological well-being of the person being rejected”.
Blocking experts or curators should be more difficult (though not impossible) compared to blocking random users. Elsewhere I’ve seen blocking mechanisms exploited to intentionally undermine those with opposing, evidence-based views. And most responsible forums with blocking mechanics explicitly forbid the blocking of those whose job it is to moderate or curate content.
When unquestioned, blocking tends to itself be exploited as either a platform-abuse strategy, a narrative control strategy, or a strategy of abusing the blocked individual. On other platforms people, whom I’ve never interacted with, have pre-emptively blocked me as the apparent response to me posting a link to a peer-reviewed study which might contradict a belief they held (COVID conspiracies) in order to prevent me from potentially seeing and responding to their denialism. The other times I’ve observed it used are in order to block another user from disagreeing. Those illegitimate uses tend to become the primary use.
I appreciate the limit of 3 unquestioned blocks, but perhaps those 3 easy blocks shouldn’t be free to apply to every other user.
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I am concerned that the current default is enabling using blocking to ‘win’ a taxonomy disagreement. Despite the guidelines saying ‘please, don’t, do that’
‘Power’ identifying when scientists keep their slice of iNat in order - takes a lot of time and effort. Some blood, sweat and tears. Some long and detailed comments to copypasta, or customise. Identifiers can burn out and leave a gaping hole.
Disgruntled observer could opt out of Community ID for the problem children, instead of blocking the identifier.
I was blocked once (not a taxonomy disagreement from me) . Quietly persevered. And was UNblocked years later.
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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.
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I think a big problem with iNat is that for the most part, it is OK for a user to do almost anything without there being any “cost”. One notable exception is that an observer who opts out of community ID will have their observation go to Casual status. I have no objective evidence to support this, but I expect that this acts as a brake on people opting out of community ID. Perhaps something similar can be used to address the issue being discussed here. If you block a curator for the taxon an observation falls under, the observation is treated the same as it would be if you opted out of community ID.
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I could see maybe requiring more IDs to reach research grade if someone is blocked after leaving an ID. I definitely wouldn’t restrict it to curators though. It’s pretty messy who is or isn’t a curator, and it isn’t determined based on ability to ID things, credentials (not that it should be) or anything else like that.
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I was just trying to think of a way to limit the scope of it, so that it would be more targeted towards those cases where the root cause of the dispute revolves around disagreements over IDs. I guess there’s no guarantee that a curator has any expertise, but I can’t think of another way to limit it to this scenario.
I know someone is going to ask “well how do you know that any particular dispute is really over an ID disagreement?”. It’s difficult to provide examples because this runs afoul of speculating about other people’s perceived motivations, etc. ( Sure, we’re technically allowed to talk about things that happen to us, but really, we’re not. )
Having some brake on the blocking feature - something which exacts an immediate, tangible cost on the user might make them have second thoughts before using it in the case of disputes over IDs. That’s why I was trying to tie the observation status to the blocking in some way.
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In terms of ID disagreements, it is tricky. Some people respond very poorly to correction and being shown to be wrong, and some other people do a very poor job of telling others they are wrong, often in a condescending or dismissive way. This is certainly not limited to iNaturalist and seems to be human nature, at least in some cultures. An ID dispute could lead to something that feels like harassment, and thus a block. To one person it feels they were blocked due to the disagreement but the other person felt it was harassment. I’ve seen cases of one person really going after another person’s observations, and i dont necessarily know who is in the right, but i’d be pretty put off if someone did that too.
The problem with putting up barriers is it gets in the way of people who actualy get harassed. This is more often than not underrepresented or otherwise unheard people and they just vanish from the site. It is often unnoticed but a huge detriment to us all in many ways. To me that’s much more important than someone abusing the block feature because of their rejection sensitive dysphoria or whatever.
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Well, at least we can all agree that the biggest problem with iNaturalist is the people who use it.
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Like I said in the original post, blocking is not something we want to implement, but there have been some unpleasant situations where it’s been necessary and, as I’ve said elsewhere, we shouldn’t be asking people to divulge traumatic events or relationships to us so we can judge whether or not they’re severe enough for us to approve a block.
I agree being blocked or rejected here or on another platform can feel like a gut punch, especially if you believe there was no transgression on your part. The way I think about this is that iNat is an incredibly diverse community where everyone has their own tolerances and sometimes one’s tolerance is breached. If you interact with enough people on iNat you’ll run into someone who for whatever reason doesn’t want to hear from you and I would try to not take it personally (easier said than done, I know) unless a pattern starts to form. Then you might consider what you could do to change the way you communicate, and ask for feedback from some trusted folks. I’m also hoping that making muting more prominent will help people choose that option if they’re just tired of getting notifications or something.
What I think could be helpful is iNat messaging you every 6 months or so and remind you that you have blocked X number of accounts and you amy want to reconsider those blocks.
As @charlie said, this is a bit tricky. There’s no designation for “expert” on iNat, and curatorship doesn’t necessarily mean you’re an expert identifier. Being a curator is about resolving flags and following the policies in the Curator Guide.
What would be cool (but not easy, I understand) is to see more experts work/collaborate on ID resources that people can use, similar to what these fly identifiers and others are doing, at least for commonly seen things. That would empower the community to help maintain data quality at a larger scale.
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I think this would go a long way.
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I’ve wondered if one small way to help this would be to split comments from IDs. Make IDs purely a suggestion for a taxon’s name and not a field that accepts a comment. The downside is that explanation of IDs would have to happen in a separate comment. But on the upside we could then separate someone’s scientific contribution vs their community behavior. Maybe someone who writes a not-nice comment gets put in “time out” where they lose the ability to make comments for some cool-off period, or blocking would only then restrict someone’s ability to write a comment on a user’s post and not their ability to add IDs. This could help with Joe’s issue. It would allow for separation of duties on the side of staff and volunteers. Another advantage of this would be that searches would work better since they currently don’t search text written in an ID.
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If you do that.
Please include reminding people about approaching iNat for help. With the email address, which is now in my list. I appreciate what you do for us behind the scenes.
And remind us to flag comments which are, jarring.
Also about the muting option.
Remind us of the various ways we can resolve misunderstandings.
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should be flagged, for that comment.
But I would want explanatory comments to remain clearly attached to the relevant ID.
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i would like this for other reasons anyway, having comments within IDs confuses notifications and makes it harder to keep track of comments. They should just automatically be separate. But it’s true it would prevent people from commenting within an ID if they were blocked from comments.
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I think it works fine the way it is. I’ve worked on another platform that has comments separate from IDs, and it is HORRIBLE. There is no sense of there being a conversation , and you have to go searching for whether there are comments that are germane to what’s happening under the IDs.
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I like this!
Although I’ve never had to block anyone so far, I have experienced stalking in the past, and it’s always a slight concern that the person will eventually make an iNat account to contact me.
People who have never been stalked don’t generally understand just how frightening and damaging it can be, and how much trauma seemingly-trivial interactions can revive when there’s a history.
For those of you worried about it interfering with identifications, please remember it is only 3 accounts that can be blocked! We may be short on identifiers, but we’re not so short that subtracting 3 is going to have a major impact on quality.
As for muting, let’s face it, if someone finds you annoying enough to mute you, they probably weren’t going to give a useful response to whatever you were trying to get their attention about.
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