Nature photography is like a video game - Steem should harness this

Anyone who follows me knows that I have started using local wildlife to try to build up some photography skills in recent months. In the process, I have learned that nature photography feels very much like playing a video game. Imagine the old Asteroids game, where random objects appear out of nowhere and you have to shoot at them to score points.

You walk out the door and start your "hunt":

What am I going to see today? I hope it's not just the same animals that I saw yesterday. Oh look! There's an animal! Oh, d@mn, it's the 6000^th Robin that I've seen in the last 3 days.

Oh, but wait! This Robin is eating a worm. Even though, I've already seen six thousand Robins, I haven't seen that before.

And look, there's another one in its nest. I wonder if I'll be able to get photos of the babies when they hatch and get older...

(spoiler alert: no, that didn't work out. The nest is empty now.)

Oh, look, there's a raptor flying overhead!

Crap! Too slow with the camera! Missed the shot. Guess I'll never know what that bird was.

Overall, it's an activity that's filled with passing and unpredictable moments of anticipation, excitement, surprise, disappointment, and satisfaction.

What does all this have to do with Steem?

IMO, the first principle of social media is that social media should be fun.

For most participants, if it feels like a job or a chore, we're doing it wrong - and they're not going to hang around. Or worse, they'll hang around and half-ass it, just to keep the rewards trickling in.

Done right, I believe that Steem can harness the emotions of "the hunt" to attract people to our social media platform. We can give players in the Steem ecosystem a fun new way to use the platform.

Here's how

Surprise! I don't know how... or at least I don't know what the end-result looks like, but I think I can imagine a minimal version that can get us started, and we can iterate and improve from there. It involves building a new Steem community.

Many hands make light work

What we need is not just another photo sharing community: Post your photos and a whale account votes for them. We already know that this model doesn't work.

Photo sharing, by itself, has been tried ad infinitum, and it always decays because of abuse. This time, we do it differently. In particular, we learn lessons from the iNaturalist identification method. Here's how they do it:

1. The "observer" posts a wildlife photo with their best guess at a species. Initially, the photo is in "Needs ID" status.
2. Identifiers can find photos that need identification, review them, and post their own opinions about what species is shown.
3. If enough identifiers agree on an identification, then the photo reaches "Research Grade".
4. If identifiers disagree, or if they don't respond at all, then the photo languishes in "Needs ID" status indefinitely.

People do all this for free, because it's easy and it's fun, and it feels like you're contributing to something useful.

So, what we need is an agreed community protocol that makes Steem photo sharing easy, fun, and useful. I'm imagining a Steem community for sharing wildlife photos with rules something like this:

1. People can post their wildlife photos and short/easy descriptions that feel like fun, not like chores.
2. Posts only receive upvotes after "enough" identifiers have agreed on a species.
3. Posts that receive significant upvotes before identification get muted, and only get unmuted if they eventually reach "identified" status, and authors who consistently receive significant upvotes before agreement get permanently muted.
4. It's clearly stated in the rules that voters should vote for the identifiers who get the species right - not just the original author.
   • We might consider having identifiers set a portion of beneficiary rewards to the original author, and requiring the author to burn some/all of their rewards. As with Thoth's rewards, this could transform the identifiers and the author into self-organized teams.

Things the community needs to decide:

1. How many identifiers must agree, in order for the photo to qualify as identified?
2. Possible rule for consideration: The author must include the approximate location, date, and time where the photo was taken - This way, sophisticated identifiers can do things like verifying animal presence and weather conditions at that location, date, and time against the photo in an effort to guard against plagiarism.
3. I'm sure the community will come up with other creative adaptations.

Of course, challenges will arise in the implementation, so community leadership will need to be ready to adapt the rules as time goes on.

What next?

This is just a sketch, and I can't do it alone, so the first thing we need is to see if there's an interest among enough Steem participants to support such a community. Who's in?

If you're interested in helping to make this a reality, go check out iNaturalist and get your own ideas about how to adapt the framework to make it a useful reality on Steem.

Thank you for your attention!

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All photos above were taken by me with a Nikon P1000 camera. I'm sharing them under the CC BY 4.0 license (share & adapt freely with attribution to the original source).