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Why I left iNaturalist

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Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#111

Post by hluska »

mmooss wrote: post #54
WoodenChair wrote: post #18

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organi…

That's one view of how to structure organizations but hardly the only one. Much of SV was built using non-hierarchical organizations, often bragging that nobody had a title. The greater corporate world embraced flat organizational structures for 1-2 decades and did very well. Toyota famously gave (gives?) everyone on the assembly line the power to stop production, and they were (are?) considered the pinnicle of autom…

Perhaps, but the writer removed themselves from leadership. They can have a whole lot of novel or even good ideas but if they’re not in a place to implement them they’re not going to succeed. Leaving leadership was a terrible decision that any business text would have advised against. You can’t beat a hierarchy unless you’re part of it.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#112

Post by geocar »

Eji1700 wrote: post #41
WoodenChair wrote: post #18

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organi…

It bothers me that pragmatism and understanding things like business, economics, and the like can often be commingled with being greedy or evil. Yes there are lots of people who use what they learn to justify shit positions but personally I started learning all these things because in any other endeavor you want to take seriously you learn everything you can about it. The number of people who mean well but then just…

If you meet someone who understand business, it's going to color your opinion of other people who meet who seem to understand business, until you either learn business or die.

That's how all prejudices work: We're wired up to be afraid and anxious and to share (and communicate) our anxieties to our friends and neighbours. We're trying to help.

The thing is, knowledge; business, economics, and so on, probably can be used to help people, but in a lot of peoples' recent memories, it's being used to harm.

I lost a lot of my teen friends when I "went corporate", but thirty years later I'm reconnecting with some of them, because people change, and we can learn to recognise someone will participate in capitalism for lots of reasons that are not so simple as being "greedy" or "evil".

But to me, I think it is simple: Capitalism is almost certainly unavoidable, so the world could be better if more kind people participate well in it than don't!

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#113

Post by khernandezrt »

The ongoing push by app developers to "simplify" everything is frustrating because it often makes tasks more cumbersome for experienced inclined users who want finer control or more advanced options. I specifically had this frustration when migrating from the original iNaturalist app to the new one. I actually use it less now because of how annoying and "simple" it is.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#114

Post by jrjeksjd8d »

WoodenChair wrote: post #18

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organi…

> He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction. Ultimately, he sounds like a caring, nice guy, who was more interested in "having everyone heard" than learning some management skills. What happened later after he dropped out of the leadership circle is just a product of that and I imagine significant bad blood between him and those who remained.

This stuck out to me too. There's nothing more frustrating for the actual leadership than someone with soft power who says they don't want to lead trying to come in and obstruct every decision.

As an armchair quarterback I feel like if he had kept his tinder dry he probably could have gotten some of what he wanted? He could have advocated to head up the casual spin-off app as a small team. Giving a founder who wants to step out of leadership a pet project is a very common way to handle this situation.

Instead it sounds like he got caught up picking fights on every decision and wasted his credibility. Talking to leadership is a skill and part of that skill is packaging things concisely and effectively. Even if the leadership used to be your confounders.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#115

Post by lelanthran »

DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote: post #39
WoodenChair wrote: post #18

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organi…

He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help.

> He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help.

This isn't a personality problem; it's far far worse (or better, depending on your point of view) than that:

FTFA

> We hired two new staff to work on it, and did our best to reconcile what little guidance we got from Leadership with an internal process focused on discussion and consent. By late 2024, the app wasn’t what anyone wanted it to be,

Yup, no surprises there.

> Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion,

> how much to disclose in our negotiations with CAS (IMO everything) or whether board members should be required to donate money (IMO no, plutocracy is bad at all times and at all levels)

> I tried to do what seemed like the only thing I could do in a hierarchy

> Accepting a grant without any consultation with staff about how its obligations might be met

...

> Since the exodus, Leadership has improved on some fronts [...] They hired three new engineers for the mobile team that seem both experienced and enthusiastic.

Well, a large grant will let you do that :-/

It seems to me that the problem was not one of personality, but of ideology.

Personality is deeply embedded in humans, ideology is merely adopted.

Author's ideology differed from that of leadership. His personality is probably irrelevant.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#116

Post by gilrain »

emptybits wrote: post #65

Enthusiastic Seek-using family here. It works so well for our very simple needs that I admit to never fully looking into iNaturalist's use of data or my ability to export or move my observations elsewhere. I've always fed our observations from Seek into iNaturalist since I though it was the "right" thing to do. Now I'm questioning it. So thank you, Ueda, for sharing this writeup that's clearly from the heart and for…

> I've always fed our observations from Seek into iNaturalist since I though it was the "right" thing to do. Now I'm questioning it.

Why? The author explicitly encourages people to keep using and contributing to iNaturalist, both data and donations. What did you read that made you disagree with them?

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#117

Post by gilrain »

crystaln wrote: post #101

I am not inclined to read this longwinded post. Anyone who writes a headline like this is not worthy of it's subject, and the popular comments would tend to agree. I'm sure the author is well intentioned and filled with integrity, however trashing a thing you created because you feel dejected is inherently self-interested and unworthy of attention.

[flagged]

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#118

Post by lelanthran »

patcon wrote: post #35
WoodenChair wrote: post #18

Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organi…

I agree that I can see plainly that he wasn't interested in certain ways of running the organization, but also... Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures -- we certainly don't condemn the very idea of hierarchy or capitalism. But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguide…

> But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguided their intentions are? Seems a little ~~off~~ unfair to me

In that might tome of an essay, where did he tal about how he fucked up? I read the whole thing and it is clear to me that he doesn't think he fucked up.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#119

Post by mnky9800n »

lelanthran wrote: post #118
patcon wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that I can see plainly that he wasn't interested in certain ways of running the organization, but also... Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures -- we certainly don't condemn the very idea of hierarchy or capitalism. But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguide…

> But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguided their intentions are? Seems a little ~~off~~ unfair to me In that might tome of an essay, where did he tal about how he fucked up? I read the whole thing and it is clear to me that he doesn't think he fucked up.

To me, not considering how I contributed to the problem is always a place to look for fuck ups.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#120

Post by Centigonal »

jorvi wrote: post #105
Earw0rm wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread: Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power. At their best, flat hierarchies do as described. At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emergin…

> At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist. Interestingly enough, this is exactly how ex-Valve employees describe their workplace.

I've heard this about both Valve and Palantir, but they also seem like extremely successful organizations. That's something I really want to understand, because my guess would have been that all the politicking would destroy productivity and hamper decisionmaking.
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