If you know any active accounts, please report it to iNat-help.
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In the absence of malicious intent, I think the correct IDs being posted by the sockpuppets are beneficial. The mods can mod as they see fit without my help.
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It was asked by iNat staff, ids are beneficial, but I saw them adding their comments right when they start iding, they mostly write in Russian, so maybe most users can’t really understand how hurtful those are, they’re not as good in writing their hate in English from what I observed.
Aah, I was referring specifically to the New Zealand instance, who simply states their name as the identifier. If people are writing abuse, then that’s a different story.
Ah, no, I can’t comment on New Zealand “one”, but I believe that if you’re actually banned something serious had to happen, I think we all make mistakes, but you need to be striked several times to be banned, imo if you now can behave normally, trying to get unbanned would be my way to do that, clearing up my name and not hiding dirty past under the rug of old account.
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Well, ultimately iNat is a social network, not a hard science resource. I believe the subject matter attracts a lot of people who are perhaps better at being social with animals and plants than they are with other human beings. What a balancing act for the mods.
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I would say it’s actually the reason iNat is as good as it is, hard science society would be much harder to communicate by new users, people who are not good in communicating with other people more often than not become scientists.) Not to say it’s a bad trait on its own, but cries for getting people more into popular science way of communication falls on deaf ears of many scientists, that would be ok if they weren’t in environment that requires that.
ultimately it is a balance and we want good people but if people are good at identifying things but also actively attack and drive away other users, is that really worth it? You have to draw a line somewhere. Where exactly that line should go can be really hard to determine, but some of the more toxic people out there will pole vault right over that line such that there isn’t really any question at all.
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Glad someone can acknowledge that.
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Regardless of the content’s value, sockpuppet accounts are (and long have been) grounds for immediate suspension from the site, per the site guidelines. There are plenty of other ways to legitimately add to the body of knowledge on iNaturalist, which the vast majority of us do without being disruptive or disrespectful to the community or to the site.
Since the originally posted question has been addressed, and this is not a place to discuss ongoing moderation issues on iNaturalist, I am going to close this topic. iNaturalist moderation concerns can be emailed to help at iNaturalist.
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