I am a huge fan of iNaturalist and the concept of citizen science. I am into herping, birding and scuba diving and I post pretty much all of my photos there. I have about 5000 observations and am approaching 2000 species. I have a private "project" with some good friends. Some of my observations are incredibly rare and one of them was even featured on their social media.

While I started using iNaturalist initially to satisfy my own curiosity about the animals and fungi I was seeing, and then expanded my usage to contribute to science in some small way, a huge unexpected benefit has been having my photos catalogued and findable by species, family, date or location. If I want to show a friend the monitor lizards I saw fighting over a huge fish in Thailand, I can find it no problem even if I don't remember exactly when that was. If I want to show someone all the cool frogs I saw in Indonesia, easy. If I can't remember where it was that I encountered a gray fox casually strolling down the trail, I can find it. Google photos and other AI tagging solutions are never going to be accurate and detailed enough to be useful in this way.

It is really an amazing tool with a shockingly friendly, welcoming and helpful community, in stark contrast with the eBird community which I find is quite unwelcoming to beginners. For example, if you make a questionable ID on iNaturalist, folks from the community will suggest what they think it might be. If you claim a rare bird on eBird you can expect a gruff email demanding evidence, or you may have it removed from your list pre-emptively. That experience may not be universal, but I have seen it multiple times. Telling people on the internet they are wrong is a favorite activity of many so I really think it's commendable the culture that iNaturalist has been able to foster.

For those who don't know, iNaturalist was created by and remained a part of the California Academy of Science until relatively recently when they were spun off into their own nonprofit entity.

For a while now the long term vision, product and engineering decisions they are making have been a bit questionable to me. The web version feels like abandonware and has some very clunky experiences. The iOS and Android apps function differently and have separate longstanding bugs, don't support all the functionality of the web version, and are also mostly abandonware while the eng team focuses on a new app that is a rewrite. Seek feels like it's trying to be Pokémon. iNat next, the new version of the iNaturalist app, has a nicer look and feel but seems like it will be released missing functionality both from the old apps and from the website.

I am not sure how important my own gripes are as a power user, perhaps in the end it will be better for new users, but it sort of feels like iNaturalists goals as an organization may not be as aligned with the original charter as they once were. For the purposes of financial stability it is probably most important to grow the user base. For the purposes of supporting citizen science initiatives it's probably more important to grow geographic distribution and the number and diversity of observations submitted, so a more balanced approach to growing the user base and supporting power users (and converting new users into power users) would probably be the approach more aligned with their original goals.