Foursquare revokes mayor editing rights

If a venue isn’t offering a mayor special, there are very few advantages to becoming a foursquare mayor. Yesterday foursquare reduced those benefits even further by taking away the right for mayors to edit their venues, leaving bragging rights as the only positive for becoming a mayor.

Mayors were previously able to edit venue information to correct typos, add phone numbers and adjust pin placements. Correcting other peoples’ mistakes was one of the advantages of becoming a mayor. Foursquare has now confirmed in a post on GetSatisfaction, though, that they’ve “rolled back the ability for mayors to edit venue name and address.”

According to foursquare, “It just didn’t make sense anymore as our user base has scaled so quickly. However, we’re working on some tools to give superusers more responsibilities and will be doing a (long-awaited) superuser upgrade soon!”

While I’m sure there were occasional instances of mayors abusing their editing power, it seems that it was an efficient way to have someone local and familiar with the venue make the necessary corrections. In rural areas, it’s rare that there’s a superuser checking venues on a regular basis, so local mayors were the only ones with the ability to edit venues. It’s odd that foursquare would choose to remove this capability before having more superusers in place to take on the task.

Venue creators are still able to edit venues they’ve created. This is helpful for users who are in the habit of adding venues quickly on their mobile phones and then entering more information once they get back to a computer.

Do you think mayors should be able to edit their venues?

/Thanks to @ack154 for pointing this out!