Submission + - Prosper "P2P Lending - Web 2.0" Censors Di (prospers.org)
Greebo writes: "Prosper Marketplace Inc., aka Prosper, previously discussed here, is a nearly 2 year old Peer-to-Peer lending site that touts itself as a proponent of the "Web 2.0" concept "taking the systems that operate our markets and society out of the hands of the elites and putting them into the hands of the masses". Yet, while they profess to be leaders of the power to the people movement, they blatantly censor open discussion by the masses they claim to be empowering. This week they launched a new blog site which openly fools comment posters into thinking their comment has been accepted, by deceptively using cookies to fake submission acceptance.
What is Prosper? The concept is simple: Don't make borrowers go to banks for money — create a community network where individuals can get loans from individuals. Prosper serviced the loan and linked borrowers to lenders.
Obviously, a concept like this would be exploitable — but for two years, the lending and borrowing community at Prosper has diligently worked to make the Prosper concept work. Lenders and borrowers alike would discuss the loans available for bidding, offer advice to financially strapped borrowers on how to fix their finances and credit reports, and point out listings that were particularly good or bad looking. Most importantly, Lenders could get true numbers from other Lenders and see that the risk involved in Prosper was hardly as safe and secure as Prosper would have you believe.
For nearly two years, Prosper supported this discussion by allowing them to take place on their own forums. However, just after Thanksgiving, Prosper shut down the old forums (partial archive available here) and replaced them with fully moderated forums. At first, while under full moderation, Prosper allowed through most posts, whether pro- or con- Prosper. This didn't last long — pretty soon Prosper deleted anything remotely negative and stopped allowing most posts through. For a while, Prosper was even openly changing posts that pointed to an un-moderated off-site discussion forum to redirect back to their own site (a move which earned accusations of deliberate mis-representation of poster's remarks by Prosper). When called on it, they stopped the practice, and then deleted all posts referring to it from their site, as if it never happened.
This week, however, they've gone a step further in their efforts to keep the "peer" out of peer-to-peer lending. They opened a new http://blog.prosper.com/" target="_blank">blog site to talk about how wonderful Prosper is, and they openly invite comments. When you post a comment, it LOOKS like your comment has been accepted. However, if you dig just a little, a review of your cookies will show that you have a new cookie for blog.prosper.com, and your comment is actually stored there. Delete the cookie, and your comment vanishes! It's another way to keep anything negative from getting posted, while ingeniously fooling the poster into thinking that Prosper is allowing their comments to be heard.
Relevant links: http://www.prosper.com/ P2P "Web 2.0" so-called proponent http://www.prospers.org/forum — Open forum discussion of Prosper (registration required)"
What is Prosper? The concept is simple: Don't make borrowers go to banks for money — create a community network where individuals can get loans from individuals. Prosper serviced the loan and linked borrowers to lenders.
Obviously, a concept like this would be exploitable — but for two years, the lending and borrowing community at Prosper has diligently worked to make the Prosper concept work. Lenders and borrowers alike would discuss the loans available for bidding, offer advice to financially strapped borrowers on how to fix their finances and credit reports, and point out listings that were particularly good or bad looking. Most importantly, Lenders could get true numbers from other Lenders and see that the risk involved in Prosper was hardly as safe and secure as Prosper would have you believe.
For nearly two years, Prosper supported this discussion by allowing them to take place on their own forums. However, just after Thanksgiving, Prosper shut down the old forums (partial archive available here) and replaced them with fully moderated forums. At first, while under full moderation, Prosper allowed through most posts, whether pro- or con- Prosper. This didn't last long — pretty soon Prosper deleted anything remotely negative and stopped allowing most posts through. For a while, Prosper was even openly changing posts that pointed to an un-moderated off-site discussion forum to redirect back to their own site (a move which earned accusations of deliberate mis-representation of poster's remarks by Prosper). When called on it, they stopped the practice, and then deleted all posts referring to it from their site, as if it never happened.
This week, however, they've gone a step further in their efforts to keep the "peer" out of peer-to-peer lending. They opened a new http://blog.prosper.com/" target="_blank">blog site to talk about how wonderful Prosper is, and they openly invite comments. When you post a comment, it LOOKS like your comment has been accepted. However, if you dig just a little, a review of your cookies will show that you have a new cookie for blog.prosper.com, and your comment is actually stored there. Delete the cookie, and your comment vanishes! It's another way to keep anything negative from getting posted, while ingeniously fooling the poster into thinking that Prosper is allowing their comments to be heard.
Relevant links: http://www.prosper.com/ P2P "Web 2.0" so-called proponent http://www.prospers.org/forum — Open forum discussion of Prosper (registration required)"
