zcommodore

VERBOTEN: DO NOT POST A COMMENT ON THIS BLOG. Prosper considers logging in to this site to be a security risk and it is required that you log in to post a comment.  DO NOT TAKE THAT CHANCE!

One of my father's favorite lines is, "The best job in the world would be to be self-employed with no customers."  Of course, this is impossible but the point is that dealing with people is a pain and makes every job worse than ideal.

Customers seem to be Prosper's problem.  They can't get enough and the ones they have complain too much.  Most borrowers can't get a loan so they complain.  Too many lenders are losing money from borrowers who stopped paying their loans so they complain.  If it weren't for those pesky customers, Prosper would be doing fine.

Back when Prosper first started, they made the fateful decision to create a forum for their users to communicate and connect and form a community.  Personally, I've never dealt with a company that had a forum for their customers so for me anyway, it was a revolutionary idea.

Even though most estimates say Prosper's forums were used by only ~10% of all Prosper users, they were very successful as far as I can tell.  Almost too successful.  A real community of users formed with many of the early adopters of Prosper's ideals forming friendships that carried over into real life. Lenders and group leaders tended to hang out more on the forums giving free advice to the borrowers and other newbies that showed up but a few borrowers hung out as well.

Unfortunately, over time negativity started cropping up and over time things began to spiral out of control.  Eventually, Prosper decided that those forums were no longer in their best interest so they eliminated them entirely and replaced them with a fully moderated forum that was almost universally disliked by the participants of the former forum.  Effectively, Prosper attempted to destroy the community that they themselves had created.

So far, Prosper has been unsuccessful in their efforts to destroy that community since there was already an alternate forum that many of the members of the community have withdrawn to.  Now Prosper seems to want to go to war against the community, their own customers, and the most passionate ones at that.

The most recent salvo by Prosper was the deletion of all members profiles that contained the word "prospers.org" in it.  I never bothered to try to find out why Prosper did this but a number of people did.  Their excuse was that this alternate forum is a "security risk" since they collect usernames, e-mail addresses and passwords that "might" be the same as the ones used on Prosper itself.

Prospers.org did encourage people to use the same username, however, Prosper distributes usernames to numerous 3rd-party sites via large data downloads that are available to any user who is signed up and wants it.  Usernames are often reused by people on numerous sites across the internet, not just Prosper and Prospers.org.  This argument is just silly in my opinion.

If Prosper was really concerned about security, they could have easily contacted Ferrix, the owner of Prospers.org and told him of their concerns.  But no, Prosper chose to use the sledge hammer approach instead and deleted their user's profiles and threatened those users with suspension if they ever did it again.  That doesn't sound like a way to "win friends and influence people".  If anything, it succeeded in causing numerous people who were on the fence with regard to continuing participating on Prosper to simply begin the withdrawal process.

I guess Prosper is succeeding in one thing.  If they continue these draconian measures, they will eliminate their problem, customers.  Unfortunately, then they will be out of business but that's a separate problem.