

I sure am glad I have the freedom to hunt through several arcane websites search functions to find a doctor that’s i think looks good based off no information other than that they have an MD and practice primary care, only to book an appointment for 6 months later, at which point they cancel my appointment because they realize that my plan is slightly different than they thought.

Idk about merlin, but with iNaturalist, the purpose was logging sightings and locations of plants/animals/fungi/etc, and letting people double check your ID so it can be used in research.
This built a massive database of images, locations, times, etc, which is a really good training set for image (or sound) recognition. Now the app is really good at automatically recognizing stuff from pictures, so people just use it for that. The app actually started to try to penalize you for using it for identification without actually logging stuff.