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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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!
> 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.
I read the piece. Who exactly, or what, is "Leadership" in this piece? (Always capitalized). A board? Upper-management? Other management? It's hard to understand it in full when "Leadership" seems to be reduced to an unnamed player - an anonymous villain.
Probably done to minimize the amount of bridges burned by avoiding names. I think leadership generally refers to the Executive Director and Heads of Product, Engagement, Development
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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?
> 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.
The ongoing push by app developers to "simplify" everything is frustrating because it often makes tasks more cumbersome for experienced inclined users who want finer control or more advanced options. I specifically had this frustration when migrating from the original iNaturalist app to the new one. I actually use it less now because of how annoying and "simple" it is.
I 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!
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
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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]
> 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.
> 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.
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...
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.
WoodenChair|1 month ago
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.
Eji1700|1 month ago
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.
jrjeksjd8d|1 month ago
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.
mmooss|1 month ago
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.
DwnVoteHoneyPot|1 month ago
Sharlin|1 month ago
duxup|1 month ago
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.
patcon|1 month ago
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
Aurornis|1 month ago
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.
rPlayer6554|1 month ago
isaacfrond|1 month ago
doctorpangloss|1 month ago
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
thaumasiotes|1 month ago
Do you have any recommendations for business books about effective management / leadership?
GrowingSideways|1 month ago
If they had something to contribute they would have figured a label to slap on
dr_dshiv|1 month ago
hibikir|1 month ago
Leadership comes down to Feynman's first principle: You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
culi|1 month ago
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.
nevdka|1 month ago
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.
palata|1 month ago
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.
calvinmorrison|1 month ago
consp|1 month ago
No true Scotsman would ever ...
PunchyHamster|1 month ago
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.
teruakohatu|1 month ago
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.
mapmeld|1 month ago
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.
geokon|1 month ago
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)
tptacek|1 month ago
neon_me|1 month ago
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!
thethethethe|1 month ago
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.
cowsandmilk|1 month ago
kayo_20211030|1 month ago
culi|1 month ago
tkuhn|1 month ago
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.
ErroneousBosh|1 month ago
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.
alexwrboulter|1 month ago
emptybits|1 month ago
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
jyoung789|1 month ago
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.
___
[0] https://ebird.org/home
[1] https://www.bumblebeewatch.org/
[2] https://www.gbif.org/
gilrain|1 month ago
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?
gyomu|1 month ago
[...]
> 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.
japhyr|1 month ago
There are way fewer observations on iNaturalist, but I know how much to trust every one of them.
shermantanktop|1 month ago
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.
khernandezrt|1 month ago
kulahan|1 month ago
donbreo|1 month ago
awakeasleep|1 month ago
chneu|1 month ago
It worked like garbage on my Samsung Galaxy devices.
cowsandmilk|1 month ago
philipallstar|1 month ago
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.
wt__|1 month ago
contingencies|1 month ago
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.
tensor|1 month ago
anotherpaul|1 month ago
turtle_|1 month ago
rjdj377dhabsn|1 month ago
Google Lens correctly identifies 1/3 of them and PictureThis 2/3.
rurp|1 month ago
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.
mistersquid|1 month ago
Anyhow, Ueda's 2024 commencement address (especially the opening) bears markers of just such a mindset. [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AECD7qfFAV0
bawolff|1 month ago
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.
tonyhart7|1 month ago
MORPHOICES|1 month ago
[deleted]
lovich|1 month ago
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.
chmod775|1 month ago
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...
n8agrin|1 month ago
crystaln|1 month ago
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.
gilrain|1 month ago
bmackenty|1 month ago