another factor:
there are tons of autistic people on iNat and we do a thing called hyperfocus where we can do a tremendous amount of …stuff… in a relatively short amount of time. I am not claiming any power user other than myself as autistic but a bunch of us are. Autistic hyperfocus and related infodumping are, in my experience, NOT competitive in nature and not poorly thought out or done on a whim. The hyperfocus-created data is if anything going to be of higher quality than other data, not worse quality. Some of us don’t care about taking pretty photos, only capturing diagnostic features, but this is an appropriate use of iNat.
yeah see, to an autistic person with this as their special interest, it isn’t crushingly boring, it actually feels really good. the chain of motivations for neurodivergent people is just different.
If i were not constrained by parenting, work (i’m an ecologist but don’t get to just do inaturalist all day), hardware, phone battery, financial concerns, and such, i would probably be generating several thousand observations every month easily and probably would have been doing so since i started in 2011. It’s just how my brain works :)