Hi all, and sorry for my absence. Cmoffroad reached out to me in a message, and I think it’s fair that I share the reasons for my inactivity with you all as well as my thoughts on the issue.
It wouldn’t be fair to blame Grab entirely for my disappearance, as there were other factors, though their corporate-sponsored editing certainly played a significant part. I was mostly busy with other IRL stuff when the mass corporate-sponsored edits began. Though I have since periodically had more free time, whenever I’d pop back in it seemed I’d only meet frustration over the sheer amount of low-quality edits now present. (See some of the changeset comments I’ve left for example.) Not all of them were Grab’s fault, but the majority surely seemed to be. Though in fairness, the frustration goes way back, to the Maps.me debacle and all that—it was quite inevitable that regression towards mediocrity would occur as OSM expanded after all. It didn’t help that the community had also practically broken down over the issue in the intervening period, despite many members’ best efforts at holding things together.
The frustration was mostly why I couldn’t maintain personal interest in the project. But to be honest, I’m not sure that I would, even without the mass editing happening. I’ve always had an agnostic view on the long-term prospects of OSM, at least in Thailand, and contributed purely as a hobby without really expecting that it would ever become complete enough for practical day-to-day use. It was just something I could enjoy doing. And personal interests do change, with or without external factors.
In any case, this distance has allowed me to look at things from a wider perspective.
I seldom use Grab (not for any related reasons; I just find hailing taxis the old-fashioned way to be more convenient than navigating their app), but recently I took one and noticed that the app’s navigation interface, which driver was using, was using OSM, and that had me thinking.
I did a bit of experimenting with OSM-based satnavs back in the early days, but I never trusted OSM enough to rely on unless it’s a route I’d personally mapped or checked entirely (which means I already knew it and didn’t need help navigating anyway). Seeing how Grab was now actually using OSM was a bit of a revelation. As hobbyists, we prided ourselves on the detail and accuracy by which our local areas were mapped (I always felt a little smug whenever I’d find an error in Google Maps that wasn’t present in OSM). But as a community, we were always too small for our coverage to come nearly close to being able to compete with the commercial providers. Grab’s mass editing may have introduced a huge amount of low-quality edits that irked us long-time contributors, but they’re also making it possible for the map to be put to practical use in real life, at least for certain uses. Their drivers are relying on it, so they do have at least some level of skin in the game, even if their bar of quality is way lower than we’d prefer. While I wish that Grab had forked the project and maintained their own thing (which would also have made a comparison of the results possible), I am wary of judging that their involvement has as a whole been a net negative to the state of OSM in Thailand as a whole, even if it clearly has been to the community. In any case, I do kind of wonder if it isn’t too late now to try turning things back.
I no longer feel informed enough on the situation, though, so I’ll refrain from voting.