What was it?
A segmented worm? A sea slug? A centipede colonized by a parasite?
When Merav Vonshak wanted to identify the gelatinous blob she had photographed floating in a shallow pool of water on a family vacation, she bypassed a wildlife related website too often beset by bickering. She gave no consideration to brand-name social media platforms known for snark or misinformation.
Instead she uploaded the picture to a site called iNaturalist, where strangers have come together to pursue a very specific type of truth: the correct scientific classification for the living things they photograph in the wild or the backyard. They have so far processed about 90 million, with at least one-quarter completed in 2022 alone. And so it went in this case, where Vonshak, an ecologist, first thought the photograph taken at California's Joshua Tree National Park in 2016 might be of a cluster of amphibian eggs.
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Like many iNaturalist users, Vonshak, 45, invokes utopian metaphors not typically associated with social media to describe the platform.
"It reminds me of 'Star Trek,' you know? Our society as I would wish it would be."
Indeed, while examining mud snakes and mosses, it has dawned on many of the iNaturalist faithful that maybe they're on to something much bigger: a model for using the internet that's governed by cooperation, not combat.
And when a consensus eventually converged on a kind of fern known as a water clover – a different class of organism, in a different phylum, in a different kingdom from her own guess – the pang that can often come with being wrong on the internet was eclipsed, she said, by what felt like a small collective triumph.
A nonprofit initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, iNaturalist says it aims to connect people to nature through technology. And the site's species-level identifications have been cited in thousands of scientific papers.
But in a moment that can feel like everything is subject to dispute – the cause of inflation, the nature of gender, the legitimacy of an election – iNaturalist has also gained recognition as a rare place on the internet where people with different points of view manage to forge agreement on what constitutes reality.
Especially for Americans disoriented by the sharp partisan divide and the feeling that oligarchs and algorithms may be distorting even the beliefs they think of as their own, there is an apparent appeal in a nature app that facilitates potent slivers of shared understanding. More than 500,000 new users have posted observations to iNaturalist from the United States in the past two years, accounting for about 40% of users worldwide. The number of observations passed 120 million this year.
And some social network scholars say its growth holds lessons for improved communication between members of the only surviving species in the genus Homo.
"Here you have a site where people are trying, together, to collectively establish what's true," said Jevin West, a data scientist at the University of Washington who studies methods to combat misinformation on social networks. He added: "We don't have a lot of good examples of that."
The stakes are, by most measures, low: Red fox or gray fox? Bee or one of many flies that evolved to mimic bees? Brown bear, grizzly bear or black bear? What to call this brown earlike mushroom that grows on trees, if the trees are in North America?
And iNaturalist is far from the only digital community that manages to mostly maintain peace by sticking to a narrow interest: Banjo Hangout for banjo nerds, Front Porch Forum for connecting neighbors in Vermont towns, Mastodon servers for every microidentity.
But it stands out as a site with the explicit aim of collaboration and consensus. West said he has come to believe that what he calls iNaturalist's "nano-agreements" may be able to translate to larger and more charged topics. And as Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter prompts a conversation about how to create lessdivisive online environments, iNaturalist is one model in the increasingly coveted "feels more cooperative" category, said Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who hosts the podcast "Reimagining the Internet."
"Maybe this process of helping someone out and saying, 'I think you might have misidentified that, I think it might be this,' " Zuckerman said, is beneficial training in being a civic participant in 2022, "rather than 'You dumbass, get off the internet, cancel your account. I can't believe you thought that was an immature red-tailed hawk.' "
iNaturalist's community guidelines include "assume people mean well," "don't justify identifications with your credentials or dismissive comments" and "you don't have to have the last word." Ken-ichi Ueda, who cocreated iNaturalist in 2008 and continues to run it with his co-director, Scott Loarie, said the site's evidence-based ethos is bolstered by the fact that users can't just mark identifications as incorrect.
With help from a computer-vision algorithm, users who upload an observation typically suggest an identification. Others can then add their own nomination in the comments. As soon as a two-thirds majority emerges, the record receives a "community ID," which can be overwritten any time the majority shifts.
Anyone can make a dismissive comment, but there may be less incentive to do so, since the only way to meaningfully disagree is to add your own identification.
No amount of mind melds on taxonomic labels, said Sophia Rosenfeld, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Democracy and Truth," is likely to fix what she calls the nation's "fractured" truth.
"This is an example of people cooperating on what to call something," Rosenfeld said. "It's not necessarily hopeful for our political life."
Still, if you click "real-time discussions" on iNaturalist and watch the comments roll in, you may find some hope for people's ability to have civil discourse – even kindness – on the internet.
