While I agree that people shouldn’t need to have “thick skin” when it comes to insults and condescension, I do think the term can apply to being corrected or told you were wrong in a civil and fact-based manner (as with an ID disagreement). And there are various acceptable ways of being corrected that not everyone will be OK with, depending on their experience and their tolerance levels. And the internet makes it easy to both misinterpret tone and intention, and also to fire back quickly before you have a chance to gather yourself.
Speaking from personal experience, I’m sometimes in a better place than others to be told I was wrong (and to be clear, this is due to my own issues with self-worth, not the fault of anyone else for correctly telling me I was wrong). I’m usually good enough to let my initial unhappiness and disappointment slide, but for some people not used to that and/or the different ways people communicate here due to experience, age, and language and cultural differences, it takes some adjusting to.
Like Marina said, one can’t always predict what will cause someone to delete their account, and the few reasons I’ve been given from time to time run the gamut from mental health crises, to iNat taking up too much of their time/being too tempting, to not being able to insult other people. I won’t discuss those further, by the way, I just wanted to give some wide-ranging exmaples.
iNat will simply never be the right place for all people, and everyone and their circumstances do change over the years. IMO it’s best to try and have it be a welcoming and beneficial place while still sticking to core ethics and purpose, and provide some options for people who don’t want to participate any longer or distance themselves from iNat. We haven’t really done the latter, and I know it’s overdue. I don’t want to make promises but I’m working on options to present and discuss with our team for account content deletion alternatives.