Bring back community relations#265

The interaction between users and the places staff is dead. The email is a black hole and it is impossible to get any kind of update on places that have been languishing for months or a year plus.

Both on the reddit as the discord this is something that frustrates many people and makes them stop posting.

I suggest to bring back the community manager job, even if it is just one day a week or even 1 a month. As long as it is regular and they can actually help.

You have a core of very enthusiastic people who work for you for free. Why chase them off if it’s so easy to placate them?

Thanks for adding this @CoolCrab . It’s helpful to have this feedback and upvotes on this issue to help the company prioritize community support and relations.

Is there a reason you don’t want people to help update these listings with pertinent information? I complained on Discord and was sent here to provide input only to find that I’d already been here. Travelers (like myself) who seek out these places (because of AO) and discover ways to improve them for others (because of incorrect or outdated information) can’t do so. I’ve submitted information on the website and via email and have never received responses. Accepting my random pictures is great. But when I drive ten miles out of my way to find a place because the information on the website is wrong, I want to be able to prevent others from going through the same thing. And I can’t because (a) you don’t let people do that, and (b) you don’t respond to or even acknowledge my messages with the correct information. I’ve noticed errors in my own hometown, even in (literally!) my own backyard, that I can’t fix. The spirit of this website, this invaluable resource for “quirky” roadtrippers like myself, seems mired in some unidentifiable muck, and nobody seems to be addressing that. And that is really disappointing.

@Dym75 Yea I feel like they really are taking their community for granted, even though they spend a lot of time and money to give them free unique content. Something like that is so incredibly rare and they are squandering it with more and more people leaving frustrated.

@Dym75 Thanks for sharing this, we really appreciate this feedback and it helps the company figure out how to prioritize the work we do.

We would like to improve the submission and edit process for our community members and it remains our goal to make Atlas Obscura an accessible space for people to explore and contribute. Right now, we have limited staff bandwidth for communicating and working on processes that already exist. Again thanks for sharing, I will continue to provide updates on this as I am able via Discord and this feedback board.