Why I Joined iNaturalist (Reluctantly) and Found a Whole New Way to See Nature

[AdamWargon]

In Mara’s thread:

@fluffyinca

https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/what-made-you-stay-on-inat/

Amy typed a nice authentic response, but that thread is locked, so I will respond here:

@arboretum_amy

I’m impressed by everyone on this thread who says the platform is intuitive and easy to use. I didn’t find that true at all.

Ditto. I find iNaturalist incredibly confusing and user UN-friendly. Not blaming anyone. I know staff are doing their best to improve this all the time.

@arboretum_amy

Within hours I decided the help pages were lacking and got busy reading forum threads. I found several things which put me off. One was the dichotomy between the “experts” and the general community, wherein the experts feel the general users are foolishly ruining the datasets, and the general users think the experts are rude and condescending. Ouch.

Yes. Also see: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/inherent-conflicts-on-inaturalist/ (105 replies)

@arboretum_amy

Another was the near total dismissal of cultivated plants. I was annoyed by the way the website lumps cultivated plants into the same category as observations missing date/location/photo, and how there is no “needs-ID” for cultivated plants.

Good point, but this has been discussed extensively on the forum, so I won’t comment on it here.