When you read the comments on any iNaturalist blog post, you might notice something interesting: many of the most active users on iNaturalist, with thousands of observations, identifications, and annotations, are not active on the iNat Forum.
Yet they are deeply involved with iNaturalist, investing a lot of time and energy in the platform.
I’m curious: why do you think so many dedicated iNaturalist users do not use the forum?
I doubt you will get any direct answers here, since by definition these users are not people who use the forum.
How about looking at it the other way: Why do you expect that they would want to use the forum? Or why “should” they do so, as your question seems to assume?
“Passionate about using iNat” does not automatically also mean “passionate about posting in the forum”. There is no logical and necessary connection between these two activities.
Maybe they do not feel a need to do so; or they prefer to spend their time other ways; or they aren’t comfortable posting in English; or they prefer other modes for discussion; or they don’t like the forum culture etc. etc.
As a lurker who pops in occasionally: There’s only so much time in a day, and time spent on the forum is time I’m not out making observations or working on uploads.
As a person who’s been highly online for decades: iNaturalist’s forums have all the same benefits and drawbacks of any group of humans (especially online humans) who are passionate about a topic. I don’t always feel like engaging with other humans about a thing, even if I like doing the thing itself.
I happen to like arguing with (I mean, passionately discussing) people on the internet, therefore I’m fairly active on this forum. Many people dislike that, and are probably not active on this or any other forum.
I’m one of those people who is very active on iNat, but not on the forum. It’s simply because I don’t feel like participating in every single post that is created and I’ll only write something if I think it’s worth the time. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not active here.
Here is another very overtly critical answer to your question from a passionate iNatter who is occasionally on the forum.
Maybe there is not much of value to gain on the forum. It is mostly a place where users solve problems that you do not experience, or people have general questions about a topic that is not necessarily of your interest. So why bother replying to that? Let the admins fix the problems and people who like a certain topic reply to it. On posts that do interest you, other more actively forum-addicted users may have already commented something of value, and so there is no need to regurgitate what has already been said just for the sake of being active on the forum.
One of the most annoying things of the forum is also that pretty much everything has already been posted once and that therefore as a reply you will often receive a referral link to an older topic, sometimes from way back and with fifty or more reactions. Good luck reading all of that and it is not the kind of enthusiasm that you were hoping for. An interested user asking “What was your most recent lifer?” will be referred back to a post from 2021 with the same question and we then wish them good luck reading all of the 400+ answers from that glorious November 2022 when some other user commented “Chestnut-marked Skipper” or something. And when someone asks for an ID, they are referred back to iNat itself, of course.
So for the majority of users, what is the value here? The forum is paradoxically either too specific or too general to spark an interest in participation for most users. (And what’s the value of earning badges for being active on the forum? A kind of childish incentive to motivate people to be active here.)
Also, the design of the forum may be somewhat boring and chaotic. It’s just a few tabs with categories and endless lines of replies that are chaotically organized. Lastly, maybe being visible to the public on the whole and not knowing who and how many people will read what you write (with my somewhat negatively interpretable reply as a great example), may deter people from participating here.
All of this being written, I deeply love iNaturalist, its interface, how iNaturalist itself is designed, the community on the whole, the interaction with other users through observations and instant messaging, etc. The forum is just not what I am interested in per se. It is just an extra tool to sporadically use if needed. In short, I guess the answer to the question basically lies within the question itself: most passionate iNaturalist users are passionate about iNaturalist itself and that is simply why they are not active on the forum. My two cents.
The blog and the forum are two very different things.
Many passionate iNatters use the forums so your observation is incorrect. But they tend to use it in more meaningful ways than just for chit-chat.
Maybe they don’t even know the forum exists? I know I didn’t until recently
I suspect that not knowing there is a forum is a factor. Maybe if iNat users were made more aware of it there’d be an increase in usage.
Perhaps many iNatters get their social media fix elsewhere, or not at all if they aren’t interested in that sort of thing. I like the forum because it has made me more aware of how iNat works and can be used, and I find many topics to be interesting, even if I don’t post a reponse. I really don’t use other social media.
I read the forums quite a bit but rarely comment so it would look like I wasn’t using them much.
As of yesterday, 17450 user accounts had been registered on this forum, so yes, that does represent lots of passionate iNatters. iNaturalist itself has close to 4 million observers, so most of them have not been participating in the forum discussions. That might not be a real problem, but some of those observers could potentially (in fact probably do) have some good ideas that would be worthwhile to present here.
That reminds me of one of my favourite forum posts:
To be blunt - time, energy, interest, language barriers, and/or Internet access.
I have no so much free time, so I use most of my time in the website, polishing out the data.
And that matters the most! Thank you for your efforts.
I am the same. I see the list of recent topics on my iNat dashboard and go to look, but to comment, need to login. I’ve just discovered I can use my iNat login to get into the Forum too so maybe I will more often in the future. Hate having to use multiple logins.
It’s not the friendliest forum format and takes a little getting used to.
But - compared to iNat itself - here we have threaded comments - which is MUCH better !
me too
There’s a well-documented pattern in online communities sometimes called the 90-9-1 rule: the vast majority of users consume content quietly, a smaller slice contribute occasionally, and a tiny fraction generate most of the visible activity. Heavy iNat users who rarely post here aren’t anomalies; they’re the norm for any platform with a forum attached to it.
Beyond that, iNaturalist scratches a very specific itch: the pleasure of careful observation, of sitting with uncertainty about what something is, of that small dopamine hit when an ID comes through. That experience is fundamentally solitary and unhurried. A forum, by contrast, is social infrastructure with its own unwritten rules, ongoing tensions, and tendency to reward the confident and quick over the thoughtful and slow. Those are genuinely different modes, and it’s not hard to see why someone would love one and find the other draining.
Reading without posting, taking what’s useful and leaving the rest, is not disengagement. It might actually be the healthiest version of participation available.
I don’t know how passionate I am, but I post when I feel I have something to contribute.