zcommodore

WARNING: Apparently, according to Prosper, the website that hosts this blog is out to steal your identity.  Reading, posting or having anything to do with Prospers.org should be done at your own risk.  Don't say you weren't warned.

Since the removal of the Prosper spreebb forums and then the subsequent addition of a fully-moderated set, Prospers.org has seen a huge increase in traffic according to the Prospers.org stats page.  Then, last weekend, when Prosper went through and deleted every mention of Prospers.org from people's profiles on Prosper, it brought even more traffic and drove the owners/participants to make the forums there more public.  In fact, Monday this week almost saw a new high in number of people logged in to the site at the same time.  In addition to the increase in traffic, we've also seen several new blogs pop-up as has been documented in various places.  You can find links to a number of them here.

Someone mentioned in another blog (I'm too lazy to go find out exactly who it was) about something known as the Barbara Streisand effect.  Basically it means that attempts to suppress something cause the exact opposite effect, an increase in knowlege about it.

At any rate, I don't know exactly what Prosper was hoping to accomplish with it's attempts to suppress the community it started.  I do know that every day, I keep seeing more and more people doing things to expand the community and knowlege of Prosper's actions as widely as possible.  I wonder if Prosper was just trying to get the community off their hands so they didn't have to deal with them at all.  Then they could spend more time on their core business?  Would that make sense?  I don't know.