Is This Nature App the Key To Saving Civilization?
Slashdot reader biobricks shares this report from the New York Times. (Alternate URLs here and here.) When Merav Vonshak wanted to identify the gelatinous blob she had photographed floating in a shallow pool of water on a family vacation, she bypassed a wildlife-related website too often beset by bickering. She gave no consideration to brand-name social media platforms known for snark or misinformation. Instead she uploaded the picture to a site called iNaturalist, where strangers have come together to pursue a very specific type of truth: the correct scientific classification for the living things they photograph in the wild or the backyard. They have so far processed about 90 million, with at least a quarter completed in 2022 alone.... Like many iNaturalist users, Dr. 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 wish it would be.") Indeed, while examining mud snakes and mosses, it has dawned on many of the iNaturalist faithful that maybe they are on to something much bigger — a model for using the web that is governed by cooperation, not combat.... A not-for-profit 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 papers. But in a moment that can feel like everything is subject to dispute — 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 manage to forge agreement on what constitutes reality.... And some social network scholars say its growth holds lessons for improved communication.... With help from a computer-vision algorithm, users who upload an observation typically suggest an identification. Others can then add their own nomination in the comments. As soon as a two-thirds majority emerges, the record receives a "community ID," which can be overwritten anytime the majority shifts.... The growth of iNaturalist has been fueled in part by technologies that have democratized the act of documenting and identifying species. Its machine-learning algorithm, trained on the identifications of iNaturalist users over the last decade, now reliably recognizes some 70,000 types of organisms and provides real-time suggestions. Better smartphone cameras have helped, as have inexpensive macro-lens attachments and the ubiquity of wireless internet access. But the article also applauds the site's "explicit aim of collaboration and consensus" — 120 million "observations" have been posted just this year — each a chance to experience one more small collective triumph. In the article one 32-year-old describes the site as "the place where I feel like I interact with strangers and work towards the common good."
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