So Tony Iwane is now outright muting or deleting my posts about taxonomy on the forum. For those who say i should bring up my concerns about taxonomy on the forum... this is why i do not do so, thought he's become much more blatant about it. I suspect this may get deleted too, but we'll see. The journal posts don't seem to be as heavily censored as the forum.
Below is the content of the post that was censored, in response to 'wait there are jobs for taxonomists?'. it is censored under the grounds of being off topic but you can see other posts on that topic and others veer far further from the relevant topic than my post. It was simply deleted because Tony, or the iNat devs in general (i don't know which), don't like the content and/or dislike being criticized. Note that outright bullying and sock puppeting doesn't even result in a ban on the site, but criticizing taxonomy results in soft-banning and censorship in the forum.
there are a few, mostly funded grad school. unfortunately it’s mostly concerned with splitting and re splitting taxa to very fine levels of identity with little emphasis on conducting inventory or finding true undescribed species (most ‘new’ species you hear about are minute variations in existing species that it’s now considered appropriate to elevate as their own species, but there are true undescribed species out there that are getting missed in that mess). Actual field inventory and monitoring are under assault from all sides while policymakers won’t fund it, universities won’t do it because it’s flashier to describe a ‘new’ species, developers and such actively obstruct it because they don’t want anything protected found near their proposed developments, and taxonomists increasingly make field inventory harder and harder with their changes and refusal to create field-ready monitoring units. So yeah the future is pretty dark. iNat offered an alternative in that anyone could do passable field inventories, but increasingly the taxonomic push to force micro-type species, even of common vascular plants and such, has spread to iNat so this site becomes significantly less powerful and useful by the day as well. The changes shrink the field time window shorter and shorter as most of the new ‘species’ can only be identified for a few weeks a year if at all, or with dissecting scopes not everyone has access to, and name change makes database management an increasingly bloated task that keeps people out of the field. For reasons i don’t understand the taxonomists on iNat also refuse to create holding bin groups for the existing species when they split them, so basically all old data is made unusable by splits. So i don’t know where the answer lies. I used to have a lot of hope iNat would be the solution but i don’t any more… however the reason isn’t the AI algorithm but what people are doing with taxonomy and forcing onto this site. iNat has a major personality conflict where it aims to be the answer to these questions, allowing anyone to inventory taxa and understand their world. But the actual trajectory of the site, led by activist taxonomist curators, linkage to dysfunctional ‘authorities’ like Plants of the World Online, and apparent staff inability, unwillingness, or lack of resources to see the problem, seems to be setting up for a big crash in the next few years. iNat is being torn in two directions, and i see one fragment of it basically becoming a customized but rarely used Survey123 solely for academics with a very robust taxonomic database perfectly mirroring POWO and such, and the other fragment becoming Project Noah - pretty pictures with no actual value in tracking biodiversity.
Download and back up your data on your own device, i guess.
