Species identification app entertains and helps create consensus on the internet

What was that? A segmented worm? A sea slug? A centipede colonized by a parasite?

When Merav Vonshak wanted to identify the gelatinous blob she had photographed floating in a shallow puddle during a family vacation, she spurned a website related to natural life often plagued by arguments. She gave no consideration to social media platforms from brands known for sarcasm or misinformation.

Instead, she uploaded the photo to a website called iNaturalist, where strangers gather to seek a very specific kind of truth: the scientifically correct classification of the living things they photograph in the wild or in the backyard. So far, they’ve processed around 90 million, with at least a quarter completed this year alone.

And it was in this case that Vonshak, an ecologist, first thought that the photograph taken in Joshua Tree National Park, California, in 2016, could be of a cluster of amphibian eggs.

Like many iNaturalist users, Vonshak, 45, invokes utopian metaphors not typically associated with social media to describe the platform.

“It reminds me of ‘Star Trek’, you know? Our society as I would like it to be.”

Indeed, when examining snakes and mud mosses, many of the faithful iNaturalists realized that perhaps they were seeing something much bigger: a model of internet usage that is governed by cooperation, not combat.

And when a consensus eventually converged on a type of fern known as a water trefoil — a different class of organism, in a different phylum, in a different realm than her hunch — the pang one can often feel at being wrong in internet was eliminated, she said, in what appeared to be a small collective triumph.

“It’s like this is everyone’s business now,” Vonshak said. “This particular organism, at this specific location, at this specific point in time.”

Growing up with ‘nanoagreements’?

A nonprofit initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, iNaturalist says it aims to connect people to nature through technology. And the site’s species-level identifications have been cited in thousands of scientific articles.

But at a time when it can seem like everything is up for debate — the cause of inflation, the nature of gender, the legitimacy of an election — iNaturalist has also gained recognition as a rare place on the internet where people with different points of view get together. to forge an agreement about what constitutes reality.

Especially for Americans disoriented by sharp partisan divides and a sense that oligarchs and algorithms may be distorting even the beliefs they deem their own, there’s an appeal to a nature app that offers powerful displays of common understanding.

More than 500,000 new US users have posted notes on iNaturalist in the last two years, representing about 40% of users worldwide. The number of observations exceeded 120 million this year.

And some social media scholars say its growth holds lessons for improving communication among members of the only surviving species of the genus Homo.

“This is a site where people are trying together to collectively establish what is true,” said Jevin West, a data scientist at the University of Washington who studies methods of combating misinformation on social media. He added, “We don’t have many good examples of that.”

The stakes, by most measures, are low: red fox or gray fox? Bumblebee or one of the many flies that evolved to mimic bees? Brown bear, grizzly bear or black bear? What to call this brown ear-shaped mushroom that grows on trees, if the trees are in North America?

And the iNaturalist is far from the only digital community that often manages to keep the peace by plugging into a narrow interest: Banjo Hangout for banjo fans, Front Porch Forum for connecting neighbors in Vermont towns, massive servers for every micro-identity.

However, it stands out as a site with the explicit goal of collaboration and consensus. West said he has come to believe that what he calls the iNaturalist’s “nanodeals” can be translated into bigger, more charged topics. And while Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter sparks a conversation about how to create less divisive online environments, iNaturalist is a model in the increasingly coveted “looks more cooperative” category, said Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, which presents the podcast Reimagining the Internet.

“Maybe this process of helping someone and saying, ‘I think you might have misidentified, I think this might be it,'” Zuckerman said, is beneficial training for being a civic participant in 2022, “rather than, ‘You idiot, get off the internet, cancel your account. I can’t believe you thought you were an immature red-tailed hawk'”.

Kind of like the Rotary Club

iNaturalist’s community guidelines include “assume people mean well,” “don’t justify tags with your credentials or dismissive comments,” and “you don’t have to have the last word.” Ken-ichi Ueda, who helped create iNaturalist in 2008 and continues to run it with his co-director Scott Loarie, said the site’s evidence-based personality is reinforced by the fact that users can’t simply mark IDs as incorrect.

With the help of a computer vision algorithm, users who submit a note often suggest an ID. Others can add their own nomination in the comments. Once a two-thirds majority emerges, the record is given a “Community ID” which can be replaced any time the majority changes.

Anyone can make a dismissive comment, but there may be less incentive to do so since the only way to meaningfully disagree is to add your own identification.

Birders who have recorded some of the nearly 11,000 species of birds in the world have been drawn to the comprehensive nature of iNaturalist, where they can also tackle the 900,000 or so named species of insects, say, or the 377,990 species of plants. Many users also joined in at the start of the pandemic, when a virus that likely jumped from a bat to other wildlife and humans may have driven home the interconnectedness of species.

But other phone apps, including Merlin for birds, PictureThis for plants and Seek, an offshoot of iNaturalist, identify some subset of the 2 million formally recognized species on the planet without the need for human communion.

That people continue to use iNaturalist, said Adam Kranz, 32, is down to a common sense of purpose that reminds him of the Rotary club his parents attended in the rural Michigan town where he grew up.

A School Aptitude Test tutor who has made it his mission to correct oak wasp misidentifications in iNaturalist, Kranz has also been concerned about his own tendency to view those with whom he disagrees politically as “you know, morally bankrupt enemies.” But iNaturalist “is where I feel like I interact with strangers and work for the common good.”

Like probably most iNaturalist users — judging by clues in profiles and discussion boards — Kranz is politically a liberal. But in interviews several of the site’s most prolific handlers have described themselves as politically conservative. And group projects on the site — Pollinators from Florida, Salticides from Oklahoma, Mud Molds from New York — tend to cut across the usual country divisions.

Thomas Everest, 22, a registered Republican voter who is highly regarded on the site as a California clam identifier, said he has come to value the humility among iNaturalist users — even the most liberal ones — that comes from admitting ignorance in front of others. people you don’t know or necessarily trust.

“It’s like, ‘Yeah, I’m putting myself there,'” said Everest, a lab technician in Ithaca, New York. “‘Here’s my frog. I don’t know what it is.'”

No amount of mind-mingling on taxonomic labels, said Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Democracy and Truth,” is likely to mend what she calls the nation’s “fractured” truth.

“This is an example of people cooperating on what to call something,” said Rosenfeld. “It’s not necessarily hopeful for our political life.”

Still, if you click on “real-time discussions” on iNaturalist and watch the comments, you might find some hope in people’s ability to have civil speech — and even kindness — on the internet.

_{Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves}