I agree with the need to normalize comments. In my area we are just a few, and sometimes we share a comment or two, but it happens so few times per year… I get so happy when I get a comment!
But I should disagree on the platform being great for comments: to me, the lack of an option for a direct reply just to the comment, is an invitation to chaos, and I think that’s why most users don’t use (or hate) comments.
If a comment could be replied to, and those replies only send notifications to the involved users instead of all watching users, it would be way better and there would be way more comments, IMHO.
I do concur; I’ll occasionally thank for spontaneously-received IDs where I’ve been particularly befuddled, they’ve put in particular effort/added discussion, or its particularly interesting, though once I figured out how much clutter thanks can be I do keep it sparing… but I do try to say thank you whenever I’ve specifically requested someone’s input and they’ve given it - I’m not always sure if they want that thanks, admittedly, depending on the type of person I pinged, but it seems appropriate regardless.
And yeah; I appreciate that people are grateful, but I’m definitely not in need of thanks for my fussing around with people’s observations (though I’m even more not-in-need of people getting grumpy about my application of coarse IDs…). I do it for fun, more or less. Honestly the two things I’d want from the notification system are colour-coding (mark the times I’ve been disagreed with in red, for instance, so I can prioritise looking at those) and some fine-tuning on observation-specific notifications - there are a lot of observations where I do want every notification so I can keep track of them, but whenever I opt to coarsely identify outside of my home ground I’d like the option to only get notifications for those observations if I’m being disagreed with, not on improving IDs - it’s cool that the squirrel is Sciurus carolinensis and all, but I’m afraid that as a west australian plant specialist I’m not planning on learning to distinguish american squirrels anytime soon, even if I can tell a squirrel from a rabbit. usually. I think.
I think Tazzy’s just slow? It varies a lot depending on the location and the activity of specialists, I find - taxa with specialists that check on it daily or nearly will fairly reliably give me a burst of notifications after I’ve gone through a bunch relevant to them, but anything else tends to be sparser.
I thought it might; yeah, there’s a big difference between a generic ‘nice!’ and something personalised, I feel, but conversely there’s also a big difference in effort between the two sorts of comments. It’s a small thing to do once or twice, but definitely not something to do on every single one of a hundred observations (can hardly copy-paste a personalised comment now can you?)
Of course some of those ‘nice!’ comments might mean “beautiful angle for ID” but its hard to tell, its true!
I sometimes do such “useless” comments that do not include ID Tips or similar when I find an observation particular interesting or special… one could probably do them more often, they sometimes evolve into nice conversations. I also regularly get involved in some personal chat that might stretch over multiple observations with IDers I frequently run into. I am sorry if that might be annoying for some, but I have no regrets… those personal touches are an essential part of what keeps IDing rewarding to me.. it’s building a little sense of community on an otherwise rather lonely task.
As an IDer with a 6-digit-number of IDs unter my belt I do not feel those friendly comments by others are too much of a burden on my notification system, actually they rarely ever happen except from some especially interesting observations that get a lot of attention.. maybe because I am reviewing a lot of old observations
Interesting and divisive topic! It seems I may run the risk of creating too many notifications because I have been devoting a lot of time recently to welcoming new members, which involves copy-pasting the same small variety of paragraphs. I do feel bad when I paste a welcome message on an observation that has already been IDed by several people–but I also think (and hope!) that trying to direct new users may save us all more trouble down the road.
I have occasionally commented on really good photos, but seeing the snowball effect I will try to weigh that more carefully. I do use the Favorite star, but a few times a comment seemed warranted, too. I do still think letting a new user what they have done well or could do better is a valuable interaction.