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My Holiday Wish for Prosper.com

If I could wish for just one thing this holiday season when it comes to Prosper.com it would be redacting any changes that lead to the appearance of censorship.

It is my opinion that the appearance of censorship on the part of Prosper.com and its management will be the downfall of Prosper.  PMI needs to remember that this is a place where lenders invest their hard earned dollars and where borrowers ask for same.  Everything that is done needs to be above board and honest to a fault.  This appearance of censorship started when Prosper erased, completely erased, the old forums and installed a new one.

I have kept track and nine out of my last ten posts to the new forums did not meet approval and were not posted.  Add to that that Prosper is sending out letters from attorneys to various members, banning anyone who mentions an outside website on Prosper.com, and erasing profiles that do the same and it looks like Prosper operates under a police state.

I want nothing more than for Prosper to succeed and it is my most fervent wish that I can work within Prosper to affect change.

As it stands now until or unless Prosper takes some action to remember who their customers are I won't be borrowing or lending again.  That's a sad statement for me to make and I hope Prosper realizes I'm not the only one who feels this way.  Many of us feel that Prosper has squandered not only the goodwill we once had but also the tremendous talents of their lender and borrower base are the customers who have been with them since the beginning.  We all share one common goal: to see Prosper succeed and become the premier site for P2P lending.  We hope Prosper shares this goal with us.

The words above were written by long-time Prosper member Cushie06.  She submitted them to the official Prosper.com blog, where they met the following response:

Unfortunately Prosper is not able to accept your post for to the Prosper Blog. Many of the sentiments expressed are shared, but we fell it is inappropriate for the blog..

Thanks Cushie.

This entry was posted on December 21st, 2007 at 10:06:18 pm and is filed under General, Prosper.com, Ethics.

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4 comments

Comment from: fred93 [Member] Email
Done. I didn't say at the beginning that they
were Cushie's words, because feeds that grab
the first paragraph or two as an excerpt would
then miss the nice opening. Hopefully the indent
makes it clearer.
12/21/07 @ 22:42
Comment from: Ferrix [Member] Email
You may want to edit the above to make it clear from the outset that the whole post is a quote. Casual readers will think you are the one speaking.
12/21/07 @ 23:14
Comment from: mr1776 [Member] Email
That was a little confusing until the end.
I know there was no "Fred93" posting on the old forums! ;-)

I do not agree completely with Cushie06, either. Though Prosper's actions were wrong, dishonest, and heavy-handed; censorship, per se, is not bad in this context.

I fully expect any decent forum to censor spam and gratuitously offensive material.

Further, a company has no obligation to host negative posts and might even be smart to remove all but the most constructive criticism. Of course, such policies should be clear, up-front, and honestly applied -- which Prosper has repeatedly failed to do.
12/22/07 @ 00:15
Comment from: PrivateLender [Member] Email
The sole reason I'm a member of Prosper is to lend my hard-earned money to worthy borrowers who are likely to pay back their loans (I don't always get this right, but I keep learning from my mistakes and trying a do a better job the next time I bid on a listing). The Prosper Forums and Prosper events are a nice added touch, but they are not the reason I'm on Prosper.

Although the moderation of the new Prosper Forums is uneven at best (e.g., sometimes embedded links are allowed and sometimes they are not), they are a vast improvement over the old Forums. The old Forums were degenerating into a hate-fest against certain participants:

(1) Optimists who prefer to see the Prosper glass as half-full rather than half-empty found themselves to be the target of ad-hominem attacks because they don't have a "Prosper sucks" attitude.

(2) Group leaders who don't kiss butt found themselves at the receiving end of a lot of verbal abuse because they don't grovel at the expectation of some of the other participants.

Those who enjoy Celebrations of the First Amendment are in luck because there are many "Let's Bash Prosper" sites starting to sprout up all over the Internet. If you visit some of these sites and are an optimist, however, you might want to keep your positive outlook to yourself because many participants won't want to learn that Prosper is doing a lot more things right than it is doing wrong.

Have a Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year. Or should that be "a -------ous New Year" (just kidding).
12/23/07 @ 20:42

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