> They insisted the app needed to be simpler, to cater first to incidental users who wanted a quick answer, to be a friction-less path to a feeling of contribution. I don’t believe that’s possible while also serving existing users who value (don’t laugh) the power and nuance of iNat, including, among many other things, the way it doesn’t give you a quick answer, forcing you to consider options when making an identification.
[...]
> iNaturalist the product is fundamentally complicated, and I have watched many, many people bounce off that wall of complexity over the years, even as I’ve seen so many people enrich their lives after they climb over it.
Oof, as someone working on consumer facing creative software, I feel that.
There is some sort of higher calling to making tools that truly teach things to people, augments their mental models and knowledge of the world, taps into their curiosity and creativity - but demands some sort of effort in return.
All those aspirations are kind of "dirty words", as they go against the currently accepted playbook of software that's as "frictionless" and "intuitive" as possible - the goal being a viral product with the potential to gather 10 million users overnight, which requires superficial, immediate results, and not really asking anything from your users unless it fits in a single screen/single tap flow.
Especially relevant in the current context of generative AI, where I've heard some argue that actually expecting people to build skill or knowledge is akin to discrimination, and anyone should be able to generate a novel without knowing how to write, a song without knowing how to compose, a painting without knowing how to draw.
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) sometimes go awry, in my personal opinion, is forgetting they are the custodian of citizen science data, not the source of it.
If you don’t like the way your data is used to train AI models, you can’t currently move your data to a non-AI service while still contributing to and using iNat data, even if such a service existed. But you should be able to do that.
100x yes! I was disgusted to learn that while the very non-profit status iNaturalist enjoys demands that they share their output, the organization thinks keeping its models secret is legitimate. https://github.com/inaturalist/inatVisionAPI No, it isn't. I am a big contributor to iNaturalist and will be sharing my concerns at the next local meeting. I tried to raise the question through the forums and was censored.
Frankly, it seems to me that iNaturalist is to open science as Android is to open source. That is to say in name only, not in spirit, because "legalese" and "market position" and "lack of enforcement". Not surprised to learn Google's money is assisting with corrupting them.
If you contribute to iNaturalist, COMPLAIN. If you want to start a class action, count me in.
> Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion, but despite my enthusiasm for the form, we didn’t start with universal buy-in or understanding from the whole team, we didn’t fully adopt its structures, and, like many democracies before us, we ultimately voted to abolish our own democracy when we formed the “leadership circle” and created a hierarchy.
I'm convinced that "what works" when it comes to self-organization is almost always a function of how involved/educated the participants are about the principles. Every time someone on HN complains about agile the typical response is that "they weren't doing agile correctly". And honestly I believe it. I just extend this to most forms of self-organization.
To be clear, I definitely do believe that certain structures are more effective than others for a given goal but I also believe that often the biggest factor in success is the buy-in and investment the members have. I even extend this (admittedly, somewhat reductive) analysis to debates between OOP vs functional codebase structures. If everyone is well versed in "proper" OOP or "proper" functional software design both strategies can be effective. If everyone is sociocracy fanatic then that can certainly work effectively. Because it's not as much about the superstructure as it is about proficiency.
agile has become "no true scotsman", it's impossible to criticize because someone always will get out of woodwork and start yelling you're doing it wrong.
I begin to think the "successful" dev teams using agile don't need agile principles in the first place and would work just fine under any other system, up and including "just a shared text file with all the current ideas and system issues", purely because they are competent at their job.
> Every time someone on HN complains about agile the typical response is that "they weren't doing agile correctly".
The problem is that "agile" is not really a thing. Originally it is just a few sentences saying "have common sense". And it became a big bullshit business with certifications and coaches.
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 organizations are structured the way they typically are, he wouldn't have experimented with so many poor (and ultimately failed) governance structures.
It seems like he was looking at his organization through a social lens (democracy, everyone should have a say) from a governance perspective but having it focused through a product lens (the app). That just doesn't mesh well. Social organizations typically have social missions, not products. When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).
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.
IMO, the difficulty with your typical business book is practical application: I've spent way too much time over my career trying to explain to leadership at different levels how they were acting in ways opposite to the very books they had on their desks. In one very high profile case, even the book they wrote!
Leadership comes down to Feynman's first principle: You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
The iNaturalist app is incidental, merely a means to an end – an end that's fundamentally social in nature. Like Wikipedia. The software merely enables the mission. This is his (very valid) viewpoint, I believe.
> 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.
My anecdotal experience with folks who gravitate towards ideas about unstructured organizations (of any kind) ... also very much expect the output of that organization will just naturally be what they want.
I sometimes wonder how their personal mental human simulator works in those cases as to me it is obvious that such an org will (among a lot of other things) not necessarily output what I want or even be predictable.
That's not a knock on the author, I appreciate the article.
> He also explicitly gave up his leadership position and then later wanted a say in management's direction.
I've gone back and forth between IC and management. Giving up the influence of being in management can be hard. If you don't agree with management's direction, it's even harder.
Hiring former managers into IC positions can be risky for this reason. A lot of former managers who switch to IC roles are amazing because they understand the management perspective and they're happy to be able to do their job without the responsibility and accountability (and meetings!) of a management role.
The risk is that you get someone who desires all of the control of being in management without the responsibility and accountability. When someone gives up management responsibilities and obligations but still wants to drive the organization, like the vibes I'm getting from this post, it's not going to end well.
> Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion, but despite my enthusiasm for the form, we didn’t start with universal buy-in or understanding from the whole team, we didn’t fully adopt its structures, and, like many democracies before us, we ultimately voted to abolish our own democracy when we formed the “leadership circle” and created a hierarchy.
Is he referencing a bunch of democracies I haven’t heard of or is this the kind of guy whose so far anarchist he thinks that republics and dictatorships are equivalent if not equal?
I tried to steel man this and looked up historical records on any democracy voting in a new, non democratic system and the closest I get is(not intending to Godwin’s law this) examples like the Nazi party being voted in and then taking authoritarian control.
You could make that argument if you squint your eyes a little or hold a high bar to the electorate, but I feel like I’m missing a reference with the way he said it.
This was a disappointing read for several reasons. The product/management/PR issues are very relatable.
The community good of a database like iNaturalist is incredibly valuable, both now and for untold uses in the future. I've read interesting research that made use of that data and have personally found the range maps produced by it interesting.
As a user I will be very sad if they kill off Seek. I'm somewhere between a casual and a power user. I don't work in a field that would use iNaturalist but am a pretty dedicated amateur when it comes to identifying plants and animal signs, and have a stack of well worn books for such. I tried getting into the iNaturalist app several times and it just never stuck. But a couple years ago I tried Seek and it has been great! It's not perfect, but it works quite well and at a minimum gives you a starting place to confirm or reject an ID.
I love iNat, and I think it has a lot of real-world value. Others seem to have a better understanding than me, but from a purely anecdotal perspective, there was a huge prairie dog colony encroaching on housing. For years, nobody did anything about it. I documented it on iNat (for fun), and within a month they were relocated safely. How cool!
> 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.
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 continuing to work on things like this: https://github.com/kueda/chuck
> Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion, but despite my enthusiasm for the form, we didn’t start with universal buy-in or understanding from the whole team
So they wanted to organize without hierarchy or coercion, but their plan depended on everyone agreeing on everything?
It just feels kind of silly. The hard part of organization is that not everyone will agree on everything. Its what you do when that happens that is the question and how you resolve disputes fairly. If your starting point is that there won't be any disputes, then you have already lost.
Quite frankly i think the biggest problem is that the author of this piece is frustrated he wasn't able to coerce people to his point of view.
Seek is great for more casual users, but also having that ML classification option inside iNat is useful for users like myself who fall somewhere in the middle between casual and enthusiast. I actively want to contribute observations but am often doing it while out doing other things and don't always have the time to agonise over the ID, so the ML classification is great for me, plus, because it's so accurate, it avoids that unfortunately common scenario where you upload an observation with an ID you're not entirely confident in, hoping another user will step in and correct it if necessary, but then it never gets that second input and you're left wondering why you bothered.
Linus tech tips did something smart. He made himself the "Chief vision officer." That way he has complete control over the direction the company is going in without the hassle of CEO duties and he can focus on what matters to make his vision possible. Kudos to that guy for actually hiring his ex-boss as his new CEO :D
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.
> Up to this point, iNat functioned as an unstructured anarchy. Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative.
While I love that anarchists and sociocrats exist, I would say from personal experience (admittedly, over 30 years ago when I was a student) that every single "anarchist collective shared living space" will get to a point where someone (even me, even if I'm attempting to be chill about everything) will grab someone by the shirt front, haul them to their feet, and threaten to knock seven shades of shit out of them if they don't take their turn of washing the dishes.
Any successful business has a lot of dishes to wash.
> Those of us who benefit from tools like iNat should be looking seriously to the decentralized models being developed by the likes of Bluesky and Mastodon, because we can’t rely on any single organization to provide that benefit forever.
Makes perfect sense to me, and I would like to point you to the technology and ecosystem of "nanopublications": https://nanopub.net/
In a nutshell, nanopublications provide a decentralized infrastructure like Mastodon, but with focus on redundantly storing open data rather than on user ownership of personal data. Moreover nanopublications are basically snippets of knowledge graphs, so they resemble database entries and can be queried as such.
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.
I empathize deeply as I was a few times in a similarly complicated situation. I know, posts like this arent about seeking "feedback" but simply releasing pressure, and thats 100% valid.
That said, one thing I learned from my own experience was to stop pointing fingers (build up badblood and seeking conflicts) and instead focus on the hard lessons about my own mistakes(learning!). I wish you the best in your next chapter. The path to becoming a good manager/colleague is never ending and demanding and its evident you want to be one ... Goodluck!
Although I don't use iNaturalist that often (because I don't want the hassle of photographing the species I definitely know) I'm always conscious of the fact it has a relatively modern stack (Rails and PostgresSQL) whereas iRecord is still limping along on Drupal (very sub-optimal DB schema and quite a few front-end annoyances due to module limitations).
> Up to this point, iNat functioned as an unstructured anarchy. Scott and I were titular “co-directors” but we did not provide a lot of direction and most of the big moves and features were driven largely by individual initiative. We never found a great way to collaborate.
This is extremely unlikely to work. We have structures and hierarchies for a reason. They aren't perfect, but they aren't pointless. It feels like when CHAZ/CHOP appeared and there were multiple child killings, but because it was based on (purported) far left principles it was sort of...fine? At least in the media.
I read the piece. Who exactly, or what, is "Leadership" in this piece? (Always capitalized). A board? Upper-management? Other management? It's hard to understand it in full when "Leadership" seems to be reduced to an unnamed player - an anonymous villain.
Probably done to minimize the amount of bridges burned by avoiding names. I think leadership generally refers to the Executive Director and Heads of Product, Engagement, Development
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 25.6 ms ] thread[...]
> iNaturalist the product is fundamentally complicated, and I have watched many, many people bounce off that wall of complexity over the years, even as I’ve seen so many people enrich their lives after they climb over it.
Oof, as someone working on consumer facing creative software, I feel that.
There is some sort of higher calling to making tools that truly teach things to people, augments their mental models and knowledge of the world, taps into their curiosity and creativity - but demands some sort of effort in return.
All those aspirations are kind of "dirty words", as they go against the currently accepted playbook of software that's as "frictionless" and "intuitive" as possible - the goal being a viral product with the potential to gather 10 million users overnight, which requires superficial, immediate results, and not really asking anything from your users unless it fits in a single screen/single tap flow.
Especially relevant in the current context of generative AI, where I've heard some argue that actually expecting people to build skill or knowledge is akin to discrimination, and anyone should be able to generate a novel without knowing how to write, a song without knowing how to compose, a painting without knowing how to draw.
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) sometimes go awry, in my personal opinion, is forgetting they are the custodian of citizen science data, not the source of it.
100x yes! I was disgusted to learn that while the very non-profit status iNaturalist enjoys demands that they share their output, the organization thinks keeping its models secret is legitimate. https://github.com/inaturalist/inatVisionAPI No, it isn't. I am a big contributor to iNaturalist and will be sharing my concerns at the next local meeting. I tried to raise the question through the forums and was censored.
Frankly, it seems to me that iNaturalist is to open science as Android is to open source. That is to say in name only, not in spirit, because "legalese" and "market position" and "lack of enforcement". Not surprised to learn Google's money is assisting with corrupting them.
If you contribute to iNaturalist, COMPLAIN. If you want to start a class action, count me in.
I'm convinced that "what works" when it comes to self-organization is almost always a function of how involved/educated the participants are about the principles. Every time someone on HN complains about agile the typical response is that "they weren't doing agile correctly". And honestly I believe it. I just extend this to most forms of self-organization.
To be clear, I definitely do believe that certain structures are more effective than others for a given goal but I also believe that often the biggest factor in success is the buy-in and investment the members have. I even extend this (admittedly, somewhat reductive) analysis to debates between OOP vs functional codebase structures. If everyone is well versed in "proper" OOP or "proper" functional software design both strategies can be effective. If everyone is sociocracy fanatic then that can certainly work effectively. Because it's not as much about the superstructure as it is about proficiency.
I begin to think the "successful" dev teams using agile don't need agile principles in the first place and would work just fine under any other system, up and including "just a shared text file with all the current ideas and system issues", purely because they are competent at their job.
The problem is that "agile" is not really a thing. Originally it is just a few sentences saying "have common sense". And it became a big bullshit business with certifications and coaches.
It seems like he was looking at his organization through a social lens (democracy, everyone should have a say) from a governance perspective but having it focused through a product lens (the app). That just doesn't mesh well. Social organizations typically have social missions, not products. When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).
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.
Leadership comes down to Feynman's first principle: You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
Do you have any recommendations for business books about effective management / leadership?
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.
I sometimes wonder how their personal mental human simulator works in those cases as to me it is obvious that such an org will (among a lot of other things) not necessarily output what I want or even be predictable.
That's not a knock on the author, I appreciate the article.
I've gone back and forth between IC and management. Giving up the influence of being in management can be hard. If you don't agree with management's direction, it's even harder.
Hiring former managers into IC positions can be risky for this reason. A lot of former managers who switch to IC roles are amazing because they understand the management perspective and they're happy to be able to do their job without the responsibility and accountability (and meetings!) of a management role.
The risk is that you get someone who desires all of the control of being in management without the responsibility and accountability. When someone gives up management responsibilities and obligations but still wants to drive the organization, like the vibes I'm getting from this post, it's not going to end well.
Is he referencing a bunch of democracies I haven’t heard of or is this the kind of guy whose so far anarchist he thinks that republics and dictatorships are equivalent if not equal?
I tried to steel man this and looked up historical records on any democracy voting in a new, non democratic system and the closest I get is(not intending to Godwin’s law this) examples like the Nazi party being voted in and then taking authoritarian control.
You could make that argument if you squint your eyes a little or hold a high bar to the electorate, but I feel like I’m missing a reference with the way he said it.
The community good of a database like iNaturalist is incredibly valuable, both now and for untold uses in the future. I've read interesting research that made use of that data and have personally found the range maps produced by it interesting.
As a user I will be very sad if they kill off Seek. I'm somewhere between a casual and a power user. I don't work in a field that would use iNaturalist but am a pretty dedicated amateur when it comes to identifying plants and animal signs, and have a stack of well worn books for such. I tried getting into the iNaturalist app several times and it just never stuck. But a couple years ago I tried Seek and it has been great! It's not perfect, but it works quite well and at a minimum gives you a starting place to confirm or reject an ID.
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.
So thank you, Ueda, for sharing this writeup that's clearly from the heart and for continuing to work on things like this: https://github.com/kueda/chuck
So they wanted to organize without hierarchy or coercion, but their plan depended on everyone agreeing on everything?
It just feels kind of silly. The hard part of organization is that not everyone will agree on everything. Its what you do when that happens that is the question and how you resolve disputes fairly. If your starting point is that there won't be any disputes, then you have already lost.
Quite frankly i think the biggest problem is that the author of this piece is frustrated he wasn't able to coerce people to his point of view.
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.
While I love that anarchists and sociocrats exist, I would say from personal experience (admittedly, over 30 years ago when I was a student) that every single "anarchist collective shared living space" will get to a point where someone (even me, even if I'm attempting to be chill about everything) will grab someone by the shirt front, haul them to their feet, and threaten to knock seven shades of shit out of them if they don't take their turn of washing the dishes.
Any successful business has a lot of dishes to wash.
Makes perfect sense to me, and I would like to point you to the technology and ecosystem of "nanopublications": https://nanopub.net/
In a nutshell, nanopublications provide a decentralized infrastructure like Mastodon, but with focus on redundantly storing open data rather than on user ownership of personal data. Moreover nanopublications are basically snippets of knowledge graphs, so they resemble database entries and can be queried as such.
Happy to elaborate if this is of interest.
That said, one thing I learned from my own experience was to stop pointing fingers (build up badblood and seeking conflicts) and instead focus on the hard lessons about my own mistakes(learning!). I wish you the best in your next chapter. The path to becoming a good manager/colleague is never ending and demanding and its evident you want to be one ... Goodluck!
This is extremely unlikely to work. We have structures and hierarchies for a reason. They aren't perfect, but they aren't pointless. It feels like when CHAZ/CHOP appeared and there were multiple child killings, but because it was based on (purported) far left principles it was sort of...fine? At least in the media.
Google Lens correctly identifies 1/3 of them and PictureThis 2/3.