Why I left iNaturalist
kueda.net254 points by erutuon 18 hours ago
254 points by erutuon 18 hours ago
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.
> 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.
It bothers me that pragmatism and understanding things like business, economics, and the like can often be commingled with being greedy or evil.
Yes there are lots of people who use what they learn to justify shit positions but personally I started learning all these things because in any other endeavor you want to take seriously you learn everything you can about it.
The number of people who mean well but then just try to hope their way through stuff and relearn the same basic principles is sadly much too high.
Hell it doesn’t even have to revolve around moral/societal principles. The number of games I’ve seen that could’ve done better if they understood marketing, business, or even basic competitive balance better (even if so you can make your party game more fun) is huge.
But then again we’ve got this generation speed running “why finance laws and institutions exist” thanks to crypto. I guess the silver lining is people do learn a lot more once they’ve had personal experience with it.
If you meet someone who understand business, it's going to color your opinion of other people who meet who seem to understand business, until you either learn business or die.
That's how all prejudices work: We're wired up to be afraid and anxious and to share (and communicate) our anxieties to our friends and neighbours. We're trying to help.
The thing is, knowledge; business, economics, and so on, probably can be used to help people, but in a lot of peoples' recent memories, it's being used to harm.
I lost a lot of my teen friends when I "went corporate", but thirty years later I'm reconnecting with some of them, because people change, and we can learn to recognise someone will participate in capitalism for lots of reasons that are not so simple as being "greedy" or "evil".
But to me, I think it is simple: Capitalism is almost certainly unavoidable, so the world could be better if more kind people participate well in it than don't!
I used to roll my eyes at fictional settings like LotR and Starcraft (Protoss) that pit orthodox/"white" magic versus forbidden/"black" magic, but now I've woken up to see this industry split into such a moral schism in multiple ways. (Aside, of course, from white/gray/black hat hackers, which is more about actions rather than knowledge)
That's one view of how to structure organizations but hardly the only one. Much of SV was built using non-hierarchical organizations, often bragging that nobody had a title. The greater corporate world embraced flat organizational structures for 1-2 decades and did very well. Toyota famously gave (gives?) everyone on the assembly line the power to stop production, and they were (are?) considered the pinnicle of automotive manufacturing.
My impression is that recent embrace of hierarchy and authority, and rejection of democracy and equality, are tied to a sharp rise in such ideas in politics. It's hard to believe it's coincidence.
And, also maybe not coincidentally, it's inherently conservative to say, 'this is the way it's always been and must be'.
Innovation is a powerful force. The management ideas the parent embraces were once innovations, which met the same response the parent gives to newer innovators.
> Much of SV was built using non-hierarchical organizations, often bragging that nobody had a title. The greater corporate world embraced flat organizational structures for 1-2 decades and did very well.
I've worked in several "flat" startups and one big company.
None of them were actually flat. There's always a hierarchy. There's always an understand chain of command.
> Toyota famously gave (gives?) everyone on the assembly line the power to stop production, and they were (are?) considered the pinnicle of automotive manufacturing.
This is a good example of how "flat" companies aren't really flat. Assembly line workers can stop production because the assembly line is part of their job. They can't fire anyone or give their peers raises, though. If you ask anyone in the comapny, they can point to the person who can fire them and can give them raises. That's the hierarchy. It always exists.
There is the famous Tyranny of Structureless essay
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
which describes issues that people struggle with to this day. When it comes to activism I think the most effective organizations I've been in have been "structureless" like that with a few people who lead because they are dedicated and have time and energy.
Personally when it comes to structure and the issues Jo talks about the cure (structure) is worse than the disease and once we start talking about Robert's Rules and bylaws and fundraising you are already losing people and going off mission. All the discussions about the perception (and somewhat reality) of "Class X of people is not being represented here" tend to turn into knock-down drag out fights, "Class X" never stepping up, and the ultimate reality of nobody being represented except for Robert and bylaws and fundraising.
It's not to say structureful organizations aren't useful but I would say organizations are basically right-wing in that they embody social hierarchy and if you feel your structureless organization is fun and exciting and making some difference in your bit of the world the way to save it when structure encroaches is to tear it down and start another one.
"Sustainable" groups tend to become what they oppose, structureless groups can seem to come out of nowhere, strike a decisive blow, then melt into the crowd.
The purpose of RRO assumes majoritarianism while ensuring the minority is heard.
As you know, there are light weight versions, for boards and committees. But nothing I'd advocate for product development.
> the most effective organizations
As a fellow recovering activist, you might be interested in Vincent Bevins' If We Burn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_We_Burn Connected some dots for me. Things I experienced but wasn't smart enough to sus and articulate.
Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread:
Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power.
At their best, flat hierarchies do as described.
At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist.
Humans are complicated, and we do seem to have a certain amount of low-level social wiring for hierarchy and pecking order, even if it's far from absolute.
I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so; large amounts of energy are expended either attempting to belong to that few, or currying favour with them. Power tends to accrue to those most inclined to seize it.
Whereas in a more formal org, people with "manager" in their title are at least subject to a minimum amount of vetting, training and oversight.
TLDR, flat hierarchy can be better than rigid hierarchy, but nominally "flat" hierarchy with power-gradient characteristics can be the worst of both worlds.
> I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so;
It works at Toyota because the stop button is something you push for specific weird things. You don't push the stop button because you think the Camry should have been designed to fit a big V8.
You push the stop button because you noticed something looks weird that might affect quality. See some rust on a part that normally doesn't have rust - push stop: better to pay the entire factory to stand around doing nothing for two hours while engineers decide that is harmless surface rust than the ship a product that is defective to customers. (this is a real situation - the engineer who decided to use those parts also monitored warranty/repair on those machines for the next few years, in case he was wrong he would have done a recall at first sign of trouble, but those machines didn't have problems any more than others so his decision was verified. I won't name the company)
I would guess the majority of times people hit stop they are eventually told "not a problem but you were right to stop just in case so thank you". There are a few times where hitting stop prevents shipping something that would fail horribly and often the part that would fail isn't visible to inspectors unless they are at the exact spot on the line someone saw it and hit stop.
Toyota has tonnes of heirarchy.
Their "andon" just means that if anyone suspects a fault, they raise a red flag (old school andon - a literal flag, US companies heard it and made it an app lol) and the line goes down until it's fixed.
This isn't anarchy or even democracy. It's totally standard for anything safety critical, Toyota just treats a flaw in a Corolla engine the same way most people treat airline crashes.
A US carrier group has tonnes of heirarchy but if the lowest ranked person sees loose spanner on the deck the whole thing shuts down instantly.
It is an interesting thing about the best military organizations is that they have hierarchy but also push a lot of responsibility downward. E.g. we don't see anything noble about The Charge of the Light Brigade
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45319/the-charge-of-t...
An infantry platoon does have leaders, it does follow orders, it is the thin edge of a very long wedge, but it has a lived reality of the members improvising under pressure.
Agreed. As another example, many managers say their 'door is open', they welcome negative feedback, etc. Only a few are serious enough about it to understand how to do that (including managing their own emotional response).
> in a more formal org, people with "manager" in their title are at least subject to a minimum amount of vetting, training and oversight.
Often they are people with connections or money, or high technical skill and complete incompetence as a manager. That's one reason people go to flatter structures - the workers do better on their own.
Organizing people toward long-term goals is a challenge. There is no way to make bad performance, incompetent or malicious, into good outcomes; no organizational design will save you.
> nominally "flat" hierarchy with power-gradient characteristics can be the worst of both worlds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...
> I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota,
I've never worked for Toyota, but as far as I can tell they take this very seriously. You can look up a history of NUMMI for a case study
> At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist.
But that's just how it works in typical normal hierarchy. The normal hierarchy just makes it easier to "pick a target" you need to please
The falling of any, whether formal or flat, is incentive misalignment, if a given structure makes it so screwing other people over so you look better is profitable, it will inevitably happen. And it's really hard to align incentives that way, like how even in "flat" companies often working on new shiny profitable brings more capital (whether social or actual) than maintaining long-term project
> I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so; large amounts of energy are expended either attempting to belong to that few, or currying favour with them. Power tends to accrue to those most inclined to seize it.
The idea that gets lost in the translation is empowering people to put stop to things that can in long term be net loss to company and trusting worker with knowing enough about their job that the power won't be used willy-nilly.
For the idea to work you not only need culture where that won't be shunned by some manager coz it made him miss their KPIs, but also having each worker be competent enough to know where to use the power
> But that's just how it works in typical normal hierarchy. The normal hierarchy just makes it easier to "pick a target" you need to please
It means that the org has been intentionally designed with that in mind, so those running it will be aware that this is an operational factor.
> For the idea to work you not only need culture where that won't be shunned by some manager coz it made him miss their KPIs, but also having each worker be competent enough to know where to use the power
And a culture which allows the worker to possess whatever information and context they need in order to exercise that competence effectively. Hiring and training is part of it, sufficiently open information-flow is the other key.
You specifically need a culture that considers "Unskilled labor" to be an oxymoron. Where a literal assembly line worker feels like they have enough expertise to say "No, this is a problem worth stopping production over".
American car companies for example have always preferred to just keep the line moving and have a later QA step fix up the problem, or literally push the problem onto the dealer.
You need to treat even your low employees as not replaceable cogs in a machine.
This is the opposite of what American business school culture has taught for decades, which is why Toyota was unable to teach GM how to do what they were doing.
Not only did GM managers not do a good job of respecting their employees, but decades of that lack of respect meant that the employees didn't trust management enough to play along with the system in good faith. Everyone was "Defecting" and it makes everyone worse off.
Yet Japan DOES have a strictly hierarchical work culture, where openly countering something your boss says isn't exactly welcome. So I wonder how this sort of "Trust your employees to have good ideas" thing came about.
> Yet Japan DOES have a strictly hierarchical work culture, where openly countering something your boss says isn't exactly welcome. So I wonder how this sort of "Trust your employees to have good ideas" thing came about.
What happened is that they bought into the Edward Deming viewpoint of Total Quality Control (TQC), and instituted this throughout their business in a way which melded correctly with their culture, ultimately resulting in Kaizen and The Toyota Way. It didn't happen overnight, it happened over a period of about 20-30 years, so that now we think of it as something inherent to Toyota that is not possible to replicate. Because of Toyota's strict commitment at the upper levels and the strict hierarchy of Japanese work culture, once they had committed they expended every necessary effort until the thing was done, which differs from American companies where it's often hard to get folks to even try anything new in the way they approach their work.
> At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist.
Interestingly enough, this is exactly how ex-Valve employees describe their workplace.
I've heard this about both Valve and Palantir, but they also seem like extremely successful organizations. That's something I really want to understand, because my guess would have been that all the politicking would destroy productivity and hamper decisionmaking.
> Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread: > > Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power. > > At their best, flat hierarchies do as described. > > At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist. > > Humans are complicated, and we do seem to have a certain amount of low-level social wiring for hierarchy and pecking order, even if it's far from absolute. > > I don't know how this applies in the context of Toyota, but there are plenty of places where pushing the Stop button - while formally permitted - has a social cost such that only a certain few are effectively given permission to do so; large amounts of energy are expended either attempting to belong to that few, or currying favour with them. Power tends to accrue to those most inclined to seize it. > > Whereas in a more formal org, people with "manager" in their title are at least subject to a minimum amount of vetting, training and oversight. > > TLDR, flat hierarchy can be better than rigid hierarchy, but nominally "flat" hierarchy with power-gradient characteristics can be the worst of both worlds.
> Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread: > > Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power. > > At their best, flat hierarchies do as described. > > At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emerging without people having the mental framework to even identify that they exist. >
And that is different from more hierarical organisations how? I mean there are plenty of stories about infiting, thiefdoms, manuvering... in hierarical organisations as well. There's also lots of example we're the disconnect between the top and lower tiers of the hierarchy (i.e. the essence of the hierarchy itself) let to the downfall of the organisation. I also fail to see the connection to the article, the organisation did not seem to have failed (in the view of the author at least), due to the failed "democratic" organisation experiments, but due to the leadership in the current hierarical organisation not listening to the "lower tiers". So if anything it seems to be a problem of the hierarical structure.
> Humans are complicated, and we do seem to have a certain amount of low-level social wiring for hierarchy and pecking order, even if it's far from absolute. >
I dislike these generalised statements about "human nature", there is way too much uncertainty and plenty of counter examples.
That said I agree with some of the other points you made, the post reads a bit weird considering that the author essentially gave up his ability to influence the course of the organisation (both by giving up his leadership seat, but also before by disenganging from the process), and the complains that the organisation did not develop how they wanted.
The difference in a hierarchical org is that the structure is laid out on paper for everyone to see. The power dynamic is explicit rather than implicit.
(At least, it's supposed to be. You do get weird inversions from time to time, when a weak manager is put in charge of a domineering empire-builder, but it's rare - and even in that case, the rest of the org can see the anomaly - as they have a frame of reference to measure it against.)
"Humans are complicated" => that is my uncertainty caveat. We're not absolute-hierarchical nor absolute-flat, in much the same way as we're neither exactly chimp-like nor gorilla-like in terms of monogamy. My observation though (and hardly an original one) is that when we build organisations which try to deny hierarchy, it has a habit of sneaking in thru the back door.
There are more differences: A formally structured org isn't a flat org with titles attached.
> "Humans are complicated" => that is my uncertainty caveat. We're not absolute-hierarchical nor absolute-flat
yes
> when we build organisations which try to deny hierarchy, it has a habit of sneaking in thru the back door.
The same happens when we try to deny freedom. Empowering everyone, through freedom and universal equality and human rights, is the foundation of the very successful modern world.
As I said upthread, I think the focus on hierarchy and power is really an outgrowth of current anti-democratic politics, even if people don't explicitly think of it that way. That doesn't deny all hierarchy or power - it's a matter of degree: The history of modern democracy is to lean heavily toward individual freedom (for essential moral reasons too).
I've used the group coordination technology of democracy in the workplace. It was both awesome and burdensome.
Awesome, because social cognition and personal empowerment are force multipliers.
Burdensome, because change is hard, empowerment means accountability, some people would rather complain than contribute.
I'd never advocate leaderless, flatness, whatever pseudo anarchist mumbo-jumbo. Doesn't work. Tyranny of Structurelessness, If We Burn, and all that.
I threaded the needle by creating an org chart comprised of well defined roles. And (most) every team member served in (most) every role, over time. So the person serving in the QA/Test role dutifully executed the QA/Test playbook. And next release they might represent the Engr, TechSupp, etc role.
Otherwise known as cross training, but with better support and culture.
YMMV, obv. Different efforts require different structures. There's a cornucopia of group decision making tools, skills, techs. Use what works best for the task and context at hand.
--
I'm very intrigued by how Oxide Computers is running things. Just from their podcasts, radically open seems like it's working for them.
Perhaps, but the writer removed themselves from leadership. They can have a whole lot of novel or even good ideas but if they’re not in a place to implement them they’re not going to succeed. Leaving leadership was a terrible decision that any business text would have advised against. You can’t beat a hierarchy unless you’re part of it.
An organization has serious problems, and incompetent leaders, if only leaders' ideas are implemented. (That doesn't necessarily disagree with what you said.)
He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help.
And ironically, after going on and on about all the details of those failures, he asks the reader for a job. Does he really think that this overly long text is a good ad for getting people to hire him?
As a potential employer, I already see in front of me the public ranting about what is wrong with my organisation if (or when) he eventually leaves again. Dodged a bullet right there.
> but he abdicated all the responsibility
He abdicated the responsibility as he from the beginning didn't have any power (always the single dissenting vote). There also isn't much leadership to provide if everyone else in the "leadership circle" is on a different frequency, or otherwise you are just a rogue actor that will quickly get kicked out.
If anything the time for him to leave would have been when he stepped down to be an engineer. I don't think there is anything wrong with laying your reasons for leaving bare, especially when many people will come asking why one of the co-founders left.
Sometimes it makes sense, if you fundamentally disagree with leadership (or peers who outvote you), it makes sense to just move on. Otherwise they just annoy you and you them. If you've made your case, both parties will be happier apart.
I stepped out of a non-profit board for a time because what was obvious to me needed to happen wasn't going to--although it did over time after my departure and I rejoined at some point.
This was my thought too. The author seems very passionate, but I imagine he could be hard to work with.
> He has opinions on how the company should be managed, what the product should be, and how to interact with the community... but he abdicated all the responsibility, didn't provide leadership, and is now complaining it didn't turn out how he wanted it. This is personality problem and business books won't help.
This isn't a personality problem; it's far far worse (or better, depending on your point of view) than that:
FTFA
> We hired two new staff to work on it, and did our best to reconcile what little guidance we got from Leadership with an internal process focused on discussion and consent. By late 2024, the app wasn’t what anyone wanted it to be,
Yup, no surprises there.
> Toward the end of our time at CAS we experimented with sociocracy as a way to organize without hierarchy and coercion,
> how much to disclose in our negotiations with CAS (IMO everything) or whether board members should be required to donate money (IMO no, plutocracy is bad at all times and at all levels)
> I tried to do what seemed like the only thing I could do in a hierarchy
> Accepting a grant without any consultation with staff about how its obligations might be met
...
> Since the exodus, Leadership has improved on some fronts [...] They hired three new engineers for the mobile team that seem both experienced and enthusiastic.
Well, a large grant will let you do that :-/
It seems to me that the problem was not one of personality, but of ideology.
Personality is deeply embedded in humans, ideology is merely adopted.
Author's ideology differed from that of leadership. His personality is probably irrelevant.
> 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.
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.
> 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
Got that exact impression from this article. No doubt the leadership has issues, but I also get the feeling he wouldn't have been happy with this direction even if a group elected it - although, to his credit, it sounds like he probably would've stuck with it longer.
Also not knocking the author, I hope he finds something more fulfilling to work on - and he's probably awesome to work with.
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.
I agree that I can see plainly that he wasn't interested in certain ways of running the organization, but also...
Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures -- we certainly don't condemn the very idea of hierarchy or capitalism.
But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguided their intentions are? Seems a little ~~off~~ unfair to me
First, I'll just say I think the iNaturalist app is great and I've used it before and enjoyed it.
I assume he had good intentions when experimenting with non-hierarchical governance, but this wasn't the right organization with which to experiment with them. If it was feeding the poor, maybe "sociocracy" makes sense. But its main goal was to make an app (and although it's a non-profit it maintains a proprietary machine learning model mind you, this isn't Wikipedia).
And when you make an app you need direction. You can't be going in 5 different major directions based on individual contributors' whims. And beyond even just the structural issues, he also needed basic leadership/management skills to direct the product which he didn't provide. "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."
So he was a director who didn't direct. Then later on when he chose to step down from being a leader, he decided he wanted to direct again. Isn't that ironic?
As far as can we criticize? Of course we can. If someone's going to write a public essay calling out other people by name and criticizing them we can criticize their essay and what they wrote about their experience.
thanks for reading my message in good faith :)
as someone who co-founded a non-hierarchical community[1] (that's still going strong after a decade of weekly events), co-founded a worker cooperative[2], and experimented with sociocracy (and ALSO fully admit I failed out of it for reasons of misalignment!) -- i just think we owe it to ourselves to not discount that certain things XY can't be built under system Z. There are many ways possible where leaders don't always direct, or maybe only direct in short spurts. This all-or-nothing, lead-from-the-front, only-way-through-is-up perspective of getting things done (and working together), it's not the only way possible :) (respectfully!)
[2]: https://hypha.coop/
Looks like cool stuff, cheers. Always interesting to learn about new ways of organizing. The great thing is if the world is free enough we can all experiment with different structures if others will agree to experiment with us. But these do sound like they fall into the social side of the dichotomy of social focused versus product focused that I mentioned. The author of the post was trying to be in both at the same time which I think is hard to do.
(I love Hypha. I'm an early member of CoSocial which you folks kindly call home on the fediverse :) )
While I'm open to the idea that "certain things XY can't be built under system Z", I think that this feels like one of those things that should be no?
My question re: non-profit co-op-ey things is usually "can this thing run sustainably by enriching users" rather than the usual "can this thing run sustainably by enriching shareholders".
A super low-overhead social network for ecology feels like it could easily fit that bill. Lots of democratically run social networks running today to attest to that.
With full respect to your right to criticize, I don't understand what differentiates an organization trying to build a social networking app around biodiversity data from an organization feeding the poor, and those organizations' ability to experiment with their governance system. Can you expand that thought or is it rhetorical?
One thing that comes to my mind is the question about what you actually want to achieve, expressed by what outcome you want to measure. In the case of „feeding the poor“, that’s relatively easy: people fed, calories distributed, maybe also health indicators and sociographic factors of the people you reach. For any app, that might be much harder: total installations? Total usage? New downloads? Additional funding raised? Feature X vs. feature Y? You can absolutely bring the „feeding the poor“ to the same level of complexity by involving politics and trying to scale to multiple locations and cities. So maybe the difference is in scale, not in technology vs. non-technology.
I mean I think there's a pretty stark difference between a charity feeding the poor and an app startup (even a non-profit one). So stark that it feels almost weird writing this comment, but I'll take your question at face value. Okay, here's a few:
- Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are likely less controversial and binary in nature than decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, as long as more people are getting fed, it's probably fine as long as it's not chaos. In a product-focused organization you need to make binary decisions: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Somebody ultimately has to be the decider on these binary decisions. They cannot all be bottom-up decisions if you want to have a cohesive vision for the product.
- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government. People who work for a charity or a government are more likely to be motivated by the common good. So they don't need as much extrinsic motivation from leadership. An app startup, even a non-profit one (which I guess can be technically a charity), is going to have workers who are also motivated by money (yes even if it's a non-profit, they have other high paying options), technical decisions, and sure the mission too. I have a couple friends who have hopped around between non-profit software organizations due to these non-mission reasons. Corralling those motivations often requires a different management mindset than working with people who are just happy to be there.
- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government and you therefore probably need to answer to your donors or voters. You need full transparency. This was an app startup, albeit a non-profit one. It doesn't really answer to anyone except who it gets grants from and even then is not fully transparent/open (has a proprietary machine learning model).
These are just a few but do you really think any governance structure can just be applied to any organization? They're not all compatible.
I think an organization's governance structure being successful has more to do with how the people in the organization want to be governed than whether it's building an app or feeding the poor.
None of this matches my experience as a board member and officer at a nonprofit, nor what I observe with my partner who has worked at multiple nonprofits.
I don’t understand the distinction you’re drawing between “charity” and “nonprofit”. iNaturalist is a 501c3, so it’s a charity [1]. One of my partner’s previous 501c3 employers produced an app to aid with their mission.
Let me reframe your first bullet to reflect my lived experience (both in the nonprofit world and building software at a for-profit):
> Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are high-stakes and often controversial compared with decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, the scarce budget won’t stretch to cover the needs of the mission. In a product-focused organization, decisions are much lower stakes. Through the magic of version control, A/B testing, and vendor app stores, you rarely need to commit deeply to decisions, so the individual developer can make the initial call: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Ship, learn, iterate.
My for-profit employer explicitly hires for (or at least used to) “passion” and intrinsic motivation. And there are several corporations I’m not willing to work for despite their reputation for high compensation. I think it’s pretty tenuous to connect org structure with motivation so directly and concretely.
The third bullet is uninformed. 501c3s answer to the people they derive funding from, their customers/clients/served population, their board, and the government (tax authority) whether they’re putting spaghetti on plates or pixels on screens. The IRS has a pretty readable intro to the requirements [2].
This kind of first-principles reasoning from vibes about what it must be like is seductive but often misleading. I encourage everyone I can to serve on a nonprofit board. The organizations can usually benefit from the perspective and different type of thinking that computer people bring, and it’ll open your eyes to new perspectives about your own work and life!
[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/921296468
[2] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
> Why do startup people get to talk about their fuckups, and we call it wise and honest and we celebrate the failures
Celebrating failures has become a very confusing concept. When someone shares their stories of trying and failing, the part we're celebrating is that they tried something. We're not celebrating the failure or validating everything they did.
The value in sharing failure stories is that others can learn from them. The person sharing the failure story also gets valid feedback.
If everyone just rolled over and applauded everything that led up to the failure, that's not helpful to anyone. It may feel good for some, but it's really unhelpful. Evaluating the situation and what went wrong is important.
The second aspect is a desire for "blameless" postmortems where we all pretend like the human element was not a factor to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. However, in cases like this, the human factor appears to be at the root of a lot of the discord. I don't think it's unfair at all to discuss that honestly.
> But when someone doing something interesting or non-hierarchical talks about their fuckups, we talk about how misguided their intentions are? Seems a little ~~off~~ unfair to me
In that might tome of an essay, where did he tal about how he fucked up? I read the whole thing and it is clear to me that he doesn't think he fucked up.
To me, not considering how I contributed to the problem is always a place to look for fuck ups.
He is not being criticized for talking about his fuckups but for ranting endlessly about how other people were not doing what he wanted, putting the blame squarely on them.
Could you recommend any book in particular?
One that would've helped is "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days" which is a collection of interviews with startup founders by Jessica Livingston. Even though this was a non-profit it effectively sounds like it was a tech startup (he was building an app that was based on, at the time (late 2000s), cutting edge machine learning technology). I think by hearing other founders' stories building other tech products, he would've learned about how they structured their organizations and led their teams. I liked the book personally, but the interviews will be hit or miss depending on the participant.
Here's the book on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3N47TG3
Here's a podcast summary of it: https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/1127af729a0d4aec/foun...
But frankly even just a basic textbook or video course on leadership/management would've helped or something like High Output Management by Andy Grove (Amazon https://amzn.to/3NCAZME, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/095f226633d34496/high...).
In terms of dealing with all of the personal conflict between team members, Radical Candor may have helped (Amazon https://amzn.to/4qNa7bf, podcast summary https://businessbooksandco.com/episode/938d044a/radical-cand...).
Why not a book about making co-operatives work, or managing direction in non-hierarchical orgs, management structure in public interest companies/charities, or establishing scientific organisations?
It sounds like he learnt lessons about the need for inclusion of users, need for strong information flow, what doesn't work (from his perspective) in hierarchy.
I read Maverick by Ricardo Semmler a long time ago and loved it about non hierarchy in business. Must re read it
SV tech startups are an incredibly niche form of business, nobody should base their thinking on general management around them alone. They function within an ecosystem designed for them, like plants that only grow in a rainforest.
Most management books that most people recommend are not based on scientific evidence, studies, academic literature, etc. They're mostly memes; relatively recent books written by some kind of famous person, benefiting from the heuristics that make people favor the famous, successful, or high status [regardless of the fact that their lessons are usually from one source, type of company, culture, etc]. Compare that to practical management books based on evidence and studies; they're boring and old, or simply not catchy or sexy, so nobody recommends them.
There's also books that some people know about, and have a good track record, yet nobody follows. Deming's books should be mandatory reading for anyone in management, and anyone who cites Toyota as a model should absolutely have read them. But good luck finding anyone who actually follows the advice (same for Ackoff, Goldratt, Senge, Jacques, etc). Likely they are just too complicated and most people are not smart enough to manage this way.
> 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.
Do you have any recommendations for business books about effective management / leadership?
> Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here,
If they had something to contribute they would have figured a label to slap on
> When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla).
you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others
I think WoodenChair's claim is that Mozilla has been organized as a social organization, which has probably been quite good for the philanthropy side. But it doesn't seem to have been particularly good for the product side, as seen from the decline in market share and perceived quality of Firefox. At least perceived quality in the eyes of techies here on HN.
Successful retirement home for failing CxOs maybe but as company Mozilla was successful 15 years ago then managed to completely squander their market lead while eroding public trust in them by various weird partnerships (like multiple times installing 3rd party addons without consent)
> you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others
I mean yeah, if you think Mozilla has been well managed over the past two decades, then yeah we're on different planes of understanding the world.
- The only product it makes that anyone cares about, Firefox, has gone from 30% market share in 2010 to 2% market share in 2025. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers
- It has put itself in a position where the vast majority of its funding comes from its main competitor, Google, who makes Chrome. Conflict of interest much? And now Google is being sued for that in an antitrust case. https://www.pcworld.com/article/2772034/googles-search-monop...
- Despite being a non-profit, its CEO was paid $7 million during a period of layoffs in 2023 https://www.i-programmer.info/news/86-browsers/16844-firefox...
- Mozilla was founded to support the development of an open source web browser. That's a critically important mission. Yet, it spends most of its money not on the web browser (maybe why the web browser is at 2% market share). https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2021/mozilla-fdn-202...
- It has started many other initiatives with a big splash that all fizzled (FirefoxOS, Pocket, etc.)
I don't know, doesn't sound like "a very successful company and philanthropy" as you put it. I would call it a *formerly* "very successful company and philanthropy."
If success was really determined by a pitch perfect combination of browser development, catering to users with features they most want, being ahead of the curve on mobile and devices, and being flexible and creative with financing.... then we would all be using Opera.
Back when memory management actually was critical, Opera had a light footprint, had a portable executable you could stick on a USB stick. They partnered with mobile vendors to get on phones very early (ahead of the iPhone!), had advanced tabs, an extensions ecosystem, "widgets", Unite (the most impressive browser idea ever imo even to this day), had clearer ideas of what the start page could be, offered to retrieve compressed pages to save data (again back when that mattered), built in ad blocking very early on, and an extremely customizeable user interface
But even they had to give up on Presto (RIP), sold the company to overseas investors, shared user data with ad brokers and develop based on Chromium. If doing everything right is what works, then what happened to Opera?
Organizations in decline often have to pay above market rate for executives, so it's hard to say that it's definitely too much. Especially when Mozilla spends ~$280,000 on software development, i.e. 40 times as much. Even paying the CEO $0 wouldn't really move the needle.
But, yeah, Mozilla has been fumbling constantly for the past decade, at least.
Just out of interest, how much should the guaranteed salary of a non-profit CEO maximally be?
I don't know but $7 million seems high for a non-profit that's in the midst of layoffs, dramatically losing marketshare, seems to have no direction, and has all of the other failures I mentioned above as Mozilla did in 2023. But point taken, without looking at a scale of other people in similar non-profit positions, it's hard to judge. I think the other points are strong though.
Guaranteed? Enough to cover living costs.
Everything else should be performance bonuses. Of which Mozilla CEO would have gotten none, based on their failure.
Mozilla the one which:
* lost market share of its product from 30 to 2%
* spends money on fun projects and acqusitions that generate no revenue, while taking away what the users wanted (addons, extensions, customizing) since supposedly this is hard to do
* spends money on politics instead of core product
And many more
You should read a business book too. Focusing on core product (firefox) should be top priority, especially if it is the only real product that generates revenue.
Soon music will stop and there will be no money, since it got spent on everything else.
The problem is Mozilla's mission is not to develop a browser! They have a browser, and it is what everyone knows them for, but their mission is only vaguely related to the browser. I don't care much about their mission - there are plenty of other charities that have similar missions if I did. I care about a great browsers and they are not delivering that - which is fine as far as their mission, but I'm miffed because I can't get what I want from anyone.
What do business books say you should do when the primary way you lose your market is illegal and anti-competitive business practices from a megacorp in a political environment anathema to punishing anti-competitive business practices?
Please tell me how Firefox was supposed to compete with Chrome being bundled with nearly any download of any software anywhere, and with a one click installer on the Google homepage. The value of that advertising alone far exceeds what Mozilla could afford.
People who think it's Mozilla's failure to have been utterly crushed by illegal business practices are so strange to me.
What did you expect to happen? Why do you think we have laws against this stuff in the first place? How would you have outspent the behemoth on advertising? How would you have overcome a competitor being included with nearly everything done on a computer?
Google Chrome's abuse of installers was so bad that Microsoft had to change how it sets "default browser" because Google was setting itself as the default entirely without user interaction! Tons of the marketshare that went from Firefox to Chrome did not do so intentionally, did not even know, and did not mean to
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.
> 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.
People will often write about something that worked for them, and from that pull out abstractions they believe are generalised and universal. They rarely are.
Organisational patterns that work for startups rapidly iterating to find product market fit won’t work well for a consultancy building a better defined product for a single client, or a corpo IT department trying to shoehorn a new distribution channel through a 30 year old logistics system.
A team of experienced engineers who know the problem domain and have worked together for years needs different organisational structures than a team of new hires and grads. A team of introverted hermits and a team of extroverts will function differently regardless of organisational structure.
You need to have some idea of where ideas work and don’t work before you can design the ones needed for your specific situation.
> 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.
> Every time someone on HN complains about agile the typical response is that "they weren't doing agile correctly".
No true Scotsman would ever ...
The agile methodologies are built around adaptive and corrective iterations of work. If an org is not adapting process, if they are not correcting process issues, they are by definition ‘not doing it right’ because they are fundamentally doing something else.
Agile can/should/must (d)evolve into waterfall in all but name if that’s the local optimum. The agile methodologies response to problems is to solve those issues through frequent iterative localized change. Failing to apply a methodology isn’t a methodological failure, per se.
Business process mislabelling and misdirected frustration about lacking management are not examples of the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Frenchmen are not Scotsmen. Not False Scotsmen nor True Scotsmen. They have a different name for a reason. No matter how many tourists confuse the flags or culture, by definition they are separate and distinct. France and Scotland are literally on different pages in the books.
It is no coincidence there is a ‘typical response’ around this that has not changed for decades. Typical responses are the MBA version of RTFM.
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.
I always thought the relgious Agile was kind of kooky when it met the real world, but I really think kanban / theory of constraints is very good and real for the business world.
as long as managers don't start slapping KPIs on it
Which is why agile falls apart... ToC/KanBan is
- prioritize - work on top item - goto 1
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.
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!
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.
I had this same mindset, and when I travel to somewhere less-traveled, I always like to post photos on iNaturalist and map parks and trails on OpenStreetMap to contribute to the open tech ecosystem.
A year or so ago someone asked Reddit for examples of how iNaturalist is used by scientists. I go on Google Scholar and it's papers about crowdsourcing, community, classrooms. I didn't see papers where the data was part of researching the plants and animals (knowing where to study, unexpected sightings, changes over time) like Budburst. Maybe biologists are doing that off the record and I'm 100% wrong, but it shook my perception that these are observations and I should upload yet another desert gecko sighting.
I work in a large conservation organization focused on rare plant conservation.
iNaturalist is sometimes used by our ecologists/biologists as a starting point for collating occurrence data.
The iNaturalist data itself is likely specifically being pulled from gbif. Then they go private/specialty databases that have more spatially and taxonomically accurate records.
But iNaturalist data is often not considered high quality enough to be publishable by itself (wide brush statement) in my field of plant conservation.
We've tried to have some conversations with iNaturalist and they weren't really interest in talking, gave me pause on what their motives as an organization are.
But conservation tools are few and far between, and iNaturalist is a really powerful tool for initial data exploration.
GBIF track the use of data we provide to scientists, where they later publish papers citing that data [1]. For iNaturalist, the list of known citations is at [2]. In most cases a download of data from GBIF will include data from more than one dataset (iNaturalist is one of over 110,000). To find how particular records in a download were used — or even if they were discarded — requires reading the paper.
As an example from the list, "Aedes albopictus Is Rapidly Invading Its Climatic Niche in France: Wider Implications for Biting Nuisance and Arbovirus Control in Western Europe" [3] cites 5348 iNaturalist records.
[1] https://www.gbif.org/literature-tracking
[2] https://www.gbif.org/resource/search?contentType=literature&...
[3] Paper https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.70414 citing GBIF data download https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.gzdq3f
PS we are recruiting an engineer, but the deadline for this position is today: https://gbif.link/senior-data-engineer
It's interesting to contrast with Wikipedia. I'm not deeply involved with either, so I'm talking out of my ass and would be curious to hear other people's thoughts here. But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled. I'm guessing iNaturalist hasn't?
The OpenStreetMaps model is also interesting. Where they basically only provide the data and expect others to make Apps/Websites
That said, it's also interesting that there hasn't been any big hit with people building new apps on top of Wikidata (I guess the website and Android app are technically different views on the same thing)
I’m not convinced that that’s an accurate view of Wikidata. Wikidata is a basically disconnected project. There is some connection, but it’s really very minimal and only for a small subset of Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is 99% just text articles, not data combined together.
Frankly, I think the reason people haven’t built apps on top of Wikidata is that the data there isn’t very useful.
I say this not to diss Wikimedia, as the Wikipedia project itself is great and an amazing tool and resource. But Wikidata is simply not there.
I am also frustrated with Wikidata. The one practical use I've seen is a lot of OpenStreetMap places' multilingual names are locked to Wikidata, which makes it harder for a troll to drop in and rename something, and may encourage maintaining and reusing the data.
But I tried to do some Wikidata queries for stuff like: what are all the neighborhoods and districts of Hong Kong, all the counties in Taiwan, and it's piecemeal coverage, tags different from one entity to another, not everything in a group is linked to OSM. It's not a lot of improvement over Wikipedia's Category pages.
> But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled.
A big part of that is that different language editions of wikipedia are very decoupled. One of the goals of wikidata was to share data between different language wikipedias. It needed to be decoupled so it was equal to all the different languages.
Wikidata is a separate project, specifically for structured data in the form of semantic triples [0]. It's essentially the open-source version of Google's KnowledgeGraph; both sourced a lot of their initial data from Metaweb's Freebase [1], which Google acquired in 2010.
Many Wikipedia articles have infobox fields that pull their values from Wikidata (and are only editable through Wikidata).
Having never used iNaturalist, but as someone who believes that Wikipedia might be one of the most important knowledge resources created in the last 100 years, I'd love to hear more about why you think this.
It’s a living biodiversity record. That kind of data has had an impact on things like: understanding human impact on the macro environment, ID new species, provide scientists with more accurate population distributions etc. Perhaps controversial, but the data has also been critical to computer science, specifically computer vision and AI algorithms. eg what’s the bird in this picture?
Between iNaturalist and Wikipedia, for me iNaturalist is the more significant of the two. I use iNat every day, have many tens of thousands of observations, and using it I've learned to identify thousands of birds, plants, bugs, fungi, and other things out there. Now I can name trees, plants, birds, et al, but more than that I understand better how they fit together into ecosystems. Also I've learned a lot of taxonomy which actually helps inform my view of the world a lot. In the process I've connected a lot more to nature, and thanks to iNat (and eBird) I now spent a lot more time doing meaningful things exploring wild spaces and spend less time scrolling on web pages. Wikipedia's invaluable as well, and completely indispensable, but between the two it's been less significant for me actually directly learning about the natural world I live in.
I use it a lot. My ex is a biologist and they use it a ton.
It's a massive dataset. There's nothing quite like it. The way people collaborate and verify information on iNat is invaluable.
The best thing about iNat is the passionate people on there. If you don't know an ID, just post it and within a day someone will correct it. It's crazy.
Download Seek and go try it out. Make sure to sign up for iNat and connect your seek to iNat so you can contribute.
Why do you recommend Seek? I’ve been using the iNat app (though since it was released, they’ve been asking me to upgrade to the newer app) and it seems fine. Take a picture or upload an existing one, get recommendations for ID, then upload to the community for further consensus!
Seek is annoying, because it throws up some kind of „please don‘t disturb nature“ dialog box every time you start it to take a photo. I hve seen that warning hundreds of times, why can‘t i disable it after a few confirmations?
I‘ve moved to the main iNaturalist app, and it does everything Seek does, but better and it’s generally also faster.
I use it to ID cool insects I come across, I get responses within few minutes to hours.
> 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.
You hit the nail on the head. The separate “power user” interface is the web app on a desktop.
> 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.
Happy to elaborate if this is of interest.
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.
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.
> 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 remember reading a pattern that describes the loss of contributors by platforms. Early users play a crucial role in establishing the primary level of quality and norms. ~
Once a platform scales, new levels of moderation, metrics, and various types of abstractions are added. Thereafter, the platform prioritizes safety and growth at the cost of craft.
One simple framework I use is the separation of: Value creation: the signal producer Value protection: the one who manages the risk and optics Value capture: the one whose interests the decisions serve These three domains represent the asymmetry that occurs in aol the platform contributors. The complex part of the problem is that from the outside, the platforms seems successful, and is growing.
Therefore the complaints that are almost always prevalent are considered “edge cases.” Unfortunately, those who were part of the ecosystem, and were most passionate contributors are the ones that are leaving.
Final thought for the builders of any community: pay attention to those who are not posting, instead of the new users who are signing up. In your experience, are there examples of the phenomenon described above? Can the platforms be salvaged after the loss of trust? What are the dead ends that are a given in these situations?
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
Ultimately, if your interest is in contributing to scientific biodiversity data collections, I really feel inatuslist is the best tool for the average person to do this.
Similarly to programs like eBird[0] or bumble bee watch [1] (both of which are taxa specific), inatuslist contributes its data to GBIF[2]. This is a large database including records from all over the world,and is made up of both modern digital observations (like those from inat), historical observations like those kept in herbariums, as well as independently published records from smaller organised research efforts.
I work as in academia and do a fair amount of spacial modeling in relation to biodiversity data, and the data from iNaturalist as published in GBIF is essentially the best coverage I can find if we are talking about large geographies. I also do my own field work, tracking specific study sites and iNaturalist is a fantastic tool for generating species lists. Within about an hour, usually while also carrying out some other field task, me and my team of technicians can capture the wide majority of plant species at a given site, all with location data, time stamps, and usually high quality photos that allow me to verify the computer vision IDs. Then back in my office, I can open up iNaturlaist online, and look through all the data, as well as download it in a consistent format. I’ve also worked out methods that allow me to do something similar (albeit more focused) for bees.
Seek offers essentially all the same value to researchers while also streamlining the experience for users. You are able to get a quick answer, and I still get the biodiversity data generated by you, without the clunkiness that comes from the inat app(s).
Beyond scientific data, as someone who is principally a botanist, I find the accuracy of iNaturalist to be far better than things like pictureThis. So even in these cases, I still think it’s worth while for the casual user to stick with seek if you’re looking to identify mainly stationary life forms or record them for your own use.
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Thank you for this really thoughtful answer. I'm going to keep using Seek because, as you say, it's streamlined for those of us who want to help researchers with data but also just want a simple answer. I have PictureThis also, but it rarely gets use.
> 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.
Why? The author explicitly encourages people to keep using and contributing to iNaturalist, both data and donations. What did you read that made you disagree with them?
Yes, he does. And I will. But he also suggests that users organize and that cessation of data or money or "withdrawing your data would be a reasonable form of protest".
I just tried their Seek app with some pictures of tree leaves nearby and it failed to identify all of them. Some pictures even caused it to crash.
Google Lens correctly identifies 1/3 of them and PictureThis 2/3.
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).
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
> 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.
Like so many others, I've gotten into birding in the last few years. I've known so many people who choose eBird over iNaturalist because it's "easier to use". But that's exactly why I don't really enjoy eBird. So many people are just running Merlin, and dumping whatever it picks up to eBird.
There are way fewer observations on iNaturalist, but I know how much to trust every one of them.
I have a hand in some complex e-commerce flows and it’s really difficult. Similar to selecting a cell phone plan, a cable package, or a car trim level with options, but in a different space.
We have all sorts of information that consumers could use to understand what combination of products will give them only the features they want and maximize the discounts. The complexity comes mostly from third-party terms.
But putting even 20% of that information in one screen is just a horrible UX. And guiding them creates rigid journeys that they can’t break out from. This, despite some great UX design talent. It’s just a really hard problem.
Nobody wants users to have to learn all this crap, but protecting them from it means the optimal thing happens only if people choose exactly the right path.
From Ken-ichi Ueda's remarks in the OP, after graduating from Berkeley he moved into a role that resembled the loosely-structured organizational patterns of an undergraduate team collaborating on a term project. Of course, such a gloss oversimplifies the complexities of the relationships and outcomes of people working together in what would become a non-profit, but even tone of the OP seems characteristic of someone still in the mindset of high-achieving baccalaureate: laissez-faire governance, aversion to hierarchy, prioritization of intellectual freedom, etc, none of which are bad or good in and of themselves.
Anyhow, Ueda's 2024 commencement address (especially the opening) bears markers of just such a mindset. [0]
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!
Is this why Seek has been broken for the past 8 months
It works fine for me on my pixel 10.
It worked like garbage on my Samsung Galaxy devices.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
I check the apps and feels very old
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.
Asking for their models to be open and banning AI are two different things. AI is used throughout the scientific world and banning it would be immensely damaging. Putting aside consumer use cases, being able to do large scale analysis or search via machine learning is incredibly important to various fields of science.
100% agree, I am still shocked that the models are not open sourced. It's the data from the community and I feel it goes very much against the spirit of the community to keep the machine learning part, which is very central to the app, so secret.
Do you have a copy of what you posted that was censored? I assume you mean censored on the iNat forum.
Yes, I do. ~Sept 2025.
Subject: iNaturalist must commit to being open
Platform(s), such as mobile, website, API, other: All
URLs (aka web addresses) of any pages, if relevant: https://github.com/inaturalist/inatVisionAPI
Description of need:
iNaturalist makes a subset of its machine learning models publicly available while keeping full species classification models private due to “intellectual property considerations and organizational policy”.
The community contribute far too much time, data, expertise and money to tolerate this, which opens questions about fundamental compatibility with science.
Feature request details:
iNaturalist should:
Remove non-open data; and Commit to fully open output…within a fixed period of time, in order to maintain community support.
Response was "Hi, this seems to be a general appeal to iNaturalist staff rather than a specific feature on the website or app that would be developed, so I’ve copied the text of your request here, where they can see it."
No response was received, so I responded to the thread as follows.
Disappointed to be effectively censored and then receive literally zero response to this after three calendar weeks.
With regards to the US status of iNaturalist:
Scientific 501(c)(3) Nonprofits are organized primarily to conduct scientific research in the public interest. Their research must benefit the general public, not specific individuals or commercial enterprises.
IMHO it’s very hard to argue that something is in the public interest if the public can’t see it, hold it, analyze it, criticize it, and replicate it: particularly in the field of science where we have a replication crisis.
If it’s a black-box service, it’s not science.
If it’s replicable and open, thus provable, it’s science.
iNaturalist should commit to fully open output…within a fixed period of time, in order to maintain community support. Otherwise, it risks community pushback on its consume-but-dont-give model, which is being sheltered under a false heading of “science”.
No response was received. Then sent a final follow-up.
Please be advised due to the lack of response I will be forced to publish my concerns in conventional botanical media.
To date, no response has been received. I am looking at that option for this year.
Can you explain what you mean by censored? For example if this was on the forum was the post deleted? If this was a bug filed, was the bug closed or deleted?
The original post was "not approved", although I have >10,000 observations and am a long term community member and this is a legit thing to complain about. The alleged opportunity for interaction occurred in some kind of private forum-hosted message thread, though no participation eventuated.
> 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.
> Is he referencing a bunch of democracies I haven’t heard of [..]
Historically: Weimar Republic, Czechoslovakia in 1948, Italy starting 1922, Austria starting 1933.
More recently: Venezuela starting 1999
Halfway there: Turkey starting 2017, Hungary starting 2010
If you broaden past just nations to include various organizations that used to be democractically organized at one point, you could make a much longer list...
Sociocracy is a theory of governance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociocracy
I’m mildly familiar with the idea, but I was referencing this subset of the quoted sentence
> … and, like many democracies before us, we ultimately voted to abolish our own democracy …
The ellipses are intentional, if the fragments of the sentence before or after change how to interpret this, please let me know
The US example that I would give would be the Articles of Confederation being turned over and replaced with our Constitution.
In the article I read this to mean: they designed a power structure thinking it should be fully open and flat, like a company where everyone can do everything on GitHub. But once they had run the project for some time, they acknowledged that the decisions were flowing through the three people.
> The US example that I would give would be the Articles of Confederation being turned over and replaced with our Constitution.
That’s a legit example I knew of, but didn’t come to mind when thinking through this. Thank you
Edit: legit from the view that the “democracy” was between states and they voted to give up some of their sovereignty to a federal government, not that The People voted for removing democracy
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.
The author encourages people to contribute data and even donate to iNaturalist.
Your wrong assumption has made you look like a reactionary ass.
how would you know the author trashed something if you didn't read the article? Maybe if we made a tik-tok for you, it would be easier to understand?