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Why I left iNaturalist

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Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#51

Post by jszymborski »

patcon wrote: post #45
WoodenChair wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, I'll just say I think the iNaturalist app is great and I've used it before and enjoyed it. I assume he had good intentions when experimenting with non-hierarchical governance, but this wasn't the right organization with which to experiment with them. If it was feeding the poor, maybe "sociocracy" makes sense. But its main goal was to make an app (and although it's a non-profit it maintains a proprietary machin…

thanks for reading my message in good faith :) as someone who co-founded a non-hierarchical community[1] (that's still going strong after a decade of weekly events), co-founded a worker cooperative[2], and experimented with sociocracy (and ALSO fully admit I failed out of it for reasons of misalignment!) -- i just think we owe it to ourselves to not discount that certain things XY can't be built under system Z. There…

(I love Hypha. I'm an early member of CoSocial which you folks kindly call home on the fediverse :) )

While I'm open to the idea that "certain things XY can't be built under system Z", I think that this feels like one of those things that should be no?

My question re: non-profit co-op-ey things is usually "can this thing run sustainably by enriching users" rather than the usual "can this thing run sustainably by enriching shareholders".

A super low-overhead social network for ecology feels like it could easily fit that bill. Lots of democratically run social networks running today to attest to that.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#52

Post by doctorpangloss »

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…

> When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).

you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#53

Post by n8agrin »

WoodenChair wrote: post #50
n8agrin wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With full respect to your right to criticize, I don't understand what differentiates an organization trying to build a social networking app around biodiversity data from an organization feeding the poor, and those organizations' ability to experiment with their governance system. Can you expand that thought or is it rhetorical?

I mean I think there's a pretty stark difference between a charity feeding the poor and an app startup (even a non-profit one). So stark that it feels almost weird writing this comment, but I'll take your question at face value. Okay, here's a few: - Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are likely less controversial and binary in nature than decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a…

I think an organization's governance structure being successful has more to do with how the people in the organization want to be governed than whether it's building an app or feeding the poor.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#54

Post by mmooss »

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 automotive manufacturing.

My impression is that recent embrace of hierarchy and authority, and rejection of democracy and equality, are tied to a sharp rise in such ideas in politics. It's hard to believe it's coincidence.

And, also maybe not coincidentally, it's inherently conservative to say, 'this is the way it's always been and must be'.

Innovation is a powerful force. The management ideas the parent embraces were once innovations, which met the same response the parent gives to newer innovators.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#55

Post by WoodenChair »

doctorpangloss wrote: post #52
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…

> When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla). you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

> you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others

I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world.

- The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

- It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...

- Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox...

- Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...

- It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.)

I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#56

Post by thethethethe »

> iNat’s current Leadership does not share this belief. To them, Seek is an off-brand liability that they don’t intend to improve. They think iNaturalist the product can serve those Seek users while also serving existing core iNat contributors to the detriment of neither.

I am a big iNaturalist user and I think the seek/iNat is confusing and a missed opportunity. Seek feels very much like a feature of iNat that is its own app for some reason. They could just make the seek app the iNat landing page and call it a day. I'm not sure how this makes the iNat app worse than it already is. I already find it a chore to use for making observations and finding out about what's around me. It's too clunky to make observations in the app itself, so I always do it after I am out of the field anyway.

Imo they should make mobile app more focused on consuming and visualizing data rather than posting observations. Seek does this for accessing identification data but I think they have a big opportunity to do similar things for seeing whats around you, identifying other's observations, and viewing trends in your own observations.

inat also has terrible performance, with slow loading photos and thumbnails. I would probably spend 10x more time on the app and make 50x more indemnifications than I do now if photos loaded faster.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#57

Post by Tomte »

kulahan wrote: post #25
chneu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use it a lot. My ex is a biologist and they use it a ton. It's a massive dataset. There's nothing quite like it. The way people collaborate and verify information on iNat is invaluable. The best thing about iNat is the passionate people on there. If you don't know an ID, just post it and within a day someone will correct it. It's crazy. Download Seek and go try it out. Make sure to sign up for iNat and connect your…

Why do you recommend Seek? I’ve been using the iNat app (though since it was released, they’ve been asking me to upgrade to the newer app) and it seems fine. Take a picture or upload an existing one, get recommendations for ID, then upload to the community for further consensus!

Seek is annoying, because it throws up some kind of „please don‘t disturb nature“ dialog box every time you start it to take a photo. I hve seen that warning hundreds of times, why can‘t i disable it after a few confirmations?

I‘ve moved to the main iNaturalist app, and it does everything Seek does, but better and it’s generally also faster.

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#58

Post by GrowingSideways »

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…

> Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here,

If they had something to contribute they would have figured a label to slap on

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#59

Post by GrowingSideways »

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…

[flagged]

Re: Why I left iNaturalist

#60

Post by kyle-rb »

geokon wrote: post #12
teruakohatu wrote: post #3

iNaturalist ranks right up there with Wikipedia in importance. It is more than one organisation, but rather a central org + a network of regional organisations. The regional organisation provides a lot of biological technical expertise. Citizen scientists alone would not be able to correctly handle the complex taxonomic issues you have in biology… or even basic identification in many cases. Where the organisation(s)…

It's interesting to contrast with Wikipedia. I'm not deeply involved with either, so I'm talking out of my ass and would be curious to hear other people's thoughts here. But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled. I'm guessing iNaturalist hasn't? The OpenStreetMaps model is also interesting. Where they basically only provide the data and expect others to ma…

Wikidata is a separate project, specifically for structured data in the form of semantic triples [0]. It's essentially the open-source version of Google's KnowledgeGraph; both sourced a lot of their initial data from Metaweb's Freebase [1], which Google acquired in 2010.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database)

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