The whole sentence from https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/what+is+it is actually:
However, despite the fact that iNat can be a bit technical and seems scientific, our primary goal in operating iNaturalist is to connect people to nature , and by that we mean getting people to feel that the non-human world has personal significance, and is worth protecting.
it occurs to me that if this is the primary goal, it’s possible that number of observations or identifications is not necessarily the best measure of success. maybe connecting people to nature includes sharing observations with larger networks, in which case maybe things like this (https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/share-observations-with-one-click-to-other-social-media/1214/9) should get increased priority?
suppose you increase linkages with a known woman-dominated social media platform like Pinterest, and that generates a lot of extra views and discussion outside of the iNat platform, but doesn’t significantly increase the number of observations or identifications in iNat itself. is that still success?
now forget about what i just said about Pinterest specifically and suppose that some portion of iNat users signed up primarily to follow their active friends, but they themselves don’t actively observe or identify. as long as they’re actively following activity on iNaturalist, does that still make them active users? or does it really only matter if you’re observing and/or identifying?