I try to go to a few Bioblitz events each year. Sometimes , I see the same people or meet people with familiar user names.
More directly on the thread theme, I just miss and feel rueful about a number of contributors who, I suppose, moved on. But, I feel really queasy and uneasy about what situations would lead to someone deleting thousands of IDs. (An ultimatum from a significant other? A disagreement with a fellow iNatter? Frustration with the lack of site development?
Like some of you, we prefer online interactions to face-to-face because asynchronicity allows us to think, revise, edit. And we probably delete more almost-posts than we ultimately post. We wilt in person these days so that online gives us more opportunity to participate. Even so, these interactions and the participation on inat contribute to much anxiety.
We know about half a dozen inatters exist and see three of them on occasion. We are not particularly concerned about who is and isn’t real. We are not worried about what people are like in their non-inat lives.
If we have an interaction with someone that meets our needs in some way, such as our need for learning or connection or community, we don’t want to look for something to mar that; we will just be grateful.
Yeah. When I read this:
A DOI is guaranteed to never change, so can be used as a persistent identifier to permanently link to an electronic article no matter where it is stored.
…my (perhaps too cynical) thought was, “So, five, ten years from now, they’ll be Error 404.”
I was born with one deaf ear. I prefer to talk to ONE person at a time. Or my hiking group discuss what we find, politely, talking one at a time - because we are all involved in the What Is IT discussion.
Social media, read and write, is addictive for me. Face to face, rather not.
I engage with what I meet on social media. I am not concerned whether what I see is ‘real’ What I was trying to remind people about - that profile may not be what it appears. Only to keep that reality check at the back of your mind. If your IDs and comments show you know this taxon - that is ALL I need on iNat.
It is weird to meet IRL - who are you? - Diana - and see the wheels spin behind someone’s eyes 
Could you share how you organize the id’s in photo names. Do you paste them in the comments for each of the images.
Regarding safety if ones own data - you are right, however it seems like a lot of additional work to keep going back and forth between online information and ones own stored images.
I am wondering if something in this process could be automated by inat itself , where it creates a back up of the ids / comments etc and allows one to access it if and when something changes ?
You can’t predict personal response on a situation, there was observer who disagreed with taxonomic take of professional botanists on some of their observations, and deleted 10k+ observations, it’s being said it was not the first site left by this person. Or look how on this forum someone disagrees with someone and then deletes their main site account. iNat is definitely much more “safer” environment than any other social website, but we’re having thousands and thousands of people here, there’re rude people who force people to quit until they themselves are banned, there’re misunderstandings, there’re many languages and different social structures, set ways of communicating, etc.
We’re definitely discussing the problem too, there’re previous threads that focused on bad experience and what to do with that, such things.
This makes sense to us. We appreciate this.
The people we know who are on iNat, we knew prior to our joining iNat. So we have never met someone whom we know just from iNat. That experience sounds disorienting…out-of-context…to meet an avatar in real life.
Incidentally, we had an interaction on an ID yesterday and after reading a comment directed to us not related to the ID, we felt scared and angry and sad. The emotional consequences of this interaction are very real for us: we did not sleep well, we tried to process the event with out therapist today, we sent a message to help@inat, we blocked the user, etc.
So could the disappearance of a user create emotions. Yes. We miss Ian.
An online-only friend of ours died this year. The hole in our life is real. We miss her and mourn. We never met in person and likely never would have. And we were friends.
We would feel stressed and confused if we were iNat staff and had to try to untangle hurt feelings. We don’t know if what happened to us yesterday violates Terms of Service, but we asked that the user is not punished because punishment doesn’t fit our values. We asked staff to ask the person not to engage in the behavior that did not meet our need for choice, our need to be seen/heard, and our need for inclusion. Maybe someone on staff could be (or already is) trained in dispute resolution or conflict de-escalation, such as training in Nonviolent Communication (NVC).
We have had our need for safety met through much of our interactions on inat and in the forum. (We aren’t on other social media.) This fresh experience, though, has helped us understand how having unmet needs for inclusion and safety could lead to account deletion for someone.
Probably not much as long as that ability to “vanish” from the site remains. Some individuals are going to do that and we can only hope the damage they inflict in the process is minimal.
Unfortunately, this has changed some of my views of the site. iNat remains a valuable tool for me and I have no intention of deleting my modest contributions – I hope they remain after I kick off and until iNat itself disappears – but can’t say with absolute certainty that years from now I won’t have a different mindset. One thing that has changed is that I’m much less inclined to become more active as a contributor after I retire and (hopefully) have more time. Building sand castles might be fun but I prefer to devote efforts to things I’m fairly certain will last a while.
Yup, e.g. there was a very rude person who created multiple accounts after being banned and just kept humiliating other users for “not on par” photos, definitely lacking any ability to see how that is not acceptable. I personally think everything should not go too far into any direction, we don’t need to walk on eggshells, but if you wouldn’t do it offline, don’t do it online. I’m glad you decided to stay, please don’t let them live in your brain, take a break for some days if needed, but don’t delete your own work that had nothing to do with that individual.
If it is ID’s I don’t want to lose from the photo, I change the file name.
My usual file name if I don’t know what it is is like:
fungi 01 - cap
fungi 01 - stipe
fungi 01 - in situ
etc etc, and then next one is 02, 03, so on so forth. If not fungi, whatever the main taxon is that i know
When i get it ID’d, I simply make it so its
science name - common name - cap
so on and so forth. This way I can easily search it by whichever name I remember at the time, and it keeps them together.
The file they are in will have the date is yyyymmdd format (for consistant order) and some descriptor such as which park.
It keeps everything organised and means I can easily recreate whatever data i need to.
I’ve gathered that this is the same person, as is the person I discussed here. https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/email-addresses-for-inaturalist-accounts-must-be-confirmed-by-july-1st-2023/37928/42
I saw a similar effect in the scarabs, I can only imagine what it was like for the Cerambycids.
Thank you. Sounds efficient, and patient :-)
https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/how-do-you-organize-your-photos/8217/72
…like the history of every Wikipedia page.
I am sorry you had to deal with that. My concern lies with affected people who quietly leave. iNat is mostly a kind and safe space. You are among friends here.
The point is: by agreeing to submit content, you gave iNat the right to do anything with that content. Means you can’t remove it. The only reason stuff should be removed (or better, modified or corrected) is if it’s wrong.
Because I change my personal physician doesn’t mean my prior medical records have to be trashed. Because I decide to end my relationship in a society (equivalent of a divorce) doesn’t mean I can make them remove all instances showing my membership, papers presented, references to my activities, etc.
I had no idea IDs could be removed on request, without just cause. This is antithetical to the accuracy that must be the foundation on which a knowledge community is built. A fix could be “designated drivers”, members who will take on the upkeep of IDs from defunct members.
Yeah no. FYI this reads dismissive at best. Victim blaming and abusive at worst, this type of thinking. Its pretty harmful to many to just say maybe grow a thicker skin. Softness is not a bad thing.
My entire world since i was 15 and started working in a lab is basically scientists. Id say at least half are ego driven “prima donas”. Then again I am queer and disabled and female/nb presenting so yeah I run into a ton of crap. Im glad you dont run into it, but realise that is not the case for everyone.
Agreed, this was an an inappropriate comment. Internet interactions are real. I’ve seen interactions on the internet that could definitely cause someone mental health damage, and yes that includes on iNat. Remember we have children as young as 13 on here as well as people of all sorts of neurology and trauma history. keep the ‘thick skin’ stuff on reddit and off of here please.
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.
Thank you for responding to the person who told us to get a thicker skin. We feel sad and angry after reading what they said and are not prepared for that after the initial incident we were writing about.
Reading your words helped us feel calmer and less alone. You helped meet our need for shared reality and support and inclusion. We are grateful!
We wanted to tell you, since you were open about yourself in that post, that the incident on inat was that a user wrote in a comment to us that our pronouns (we/us) are not “appropriate.” They told us we are supposed to use “I.” Being nonbinary is challenging in our life, and getting criticized and policed is not helping us.
inat did handle the situation as we requested, which was not to punish or suspend the use of in fact it was a violation of terms of service (because our values oppose punishment) but to contact the user and ask them not to tell people what they can call themselves.
We are quite devastated by that experience and do not have a thick skin.
You helped us feel more connected. We hope this isn’t oversharing. We don’t have many friends and appreciate when someone contributes to us as you did