After the election failure of the Dutch Pirate Party in june 2010, slowly but steadily parliament members are starting to make sense. The GreenLeft (GroenLinks) and democrats (D66) have the most pro-internet civil rights stances. That a D66 parliament member states no ACTA secrecy can exist confirms this.
Some statements from other more conservative parties (like CDA (Christian), VVD (classical conservative)) even smell to very, very, very small babysteps in understanding civil rights on the net. Still, too much idiocy comes from them (VVD actively supporting dutch equivalent of MPAA, CDA supporting censorship). But I do notice a slow movement towards understanding the net, and how civil rights should be protected on the net.
And why the downvote below for HnNoPassMailer? All he said was correct. Was it the "failure of the Dutch Pirate Party" bit? Because they did fail. The German and Swedish Pirate Parties are excellent, but ours just keep blundering on public relations, they're geeks with great ideals but they're not politicians. Maybe they should partner up with BitsofFreedom or something, BOF.nl seems to know how to handle publicity.
I didn't even see HnNoPassMailer until I turned on showdead, and after I did I only saw an upvote link, not a downvote link. I think it's some feature of HN.
His/her last two comments seem to be dead, which might suggest he/she's been banned and has his/her comments now autodeaded. I don't see anything obvious in the comment/submission history that'd explain why there'd be a ban, but I don't really know how these things work.
Moderators (or perhaps some automated system) seem to be quite trigger-happy on the hellbannings. That is the kind of ban where you disappear for everybody else (unless they got `showdead` enabled), but the person themselves has no idea what's going on, or why.
I even saw a guy here get hellbanned for a rather tasteless joke. It certainly deserved all the downvotes it must have gotten and was sufficiently inappropriate to at least warrant a warning, suspension or perhaps even an actual ban. But hellbanning is completely counterproductive in these situations. The guy just continued posting for weeks, completely oblivious to the fact that nobody was replying to him, or upvoting him! Let alone that he had any idea he did something wrong. (IMO a warning would have sufficed on first offence since the rest of his comments were constructive enough, he was no troll)
In summary: hellbans are only useful against repeatedly banned disruptive trolls that won't listen to reason and will just proxy back in with a new account after you IP-ban them because it delays them and they may get bored give up and go away. A temporary hellban is the most useless thing ever, it just wastes people's time and if they are bad enough they deserved that, you probably didn't want to let them back in later. A hellban can be mildly effective to spammers but not much since they expect or detect it sooner.
Personally I've found the slowban to be most effective against the most stubborn and disruptive return trolls (and only those). There's even science to point out that pageload delays directly reduce participation, which is exactly what you want. But the forum I admin attracts those types by its very nature, while in the 1.5yr I've been on HN, I actually haven't seen any of such trolls. The up/downvote system works too well for that (to the point that it sometimes tips the balance the other way into circlejerk territory, but that's another discussion).
This IMO not-always-correct-or-effective moderating is why I have `show dead` turned on, and sometimes when I'm paranoid, check from a different IP if my comments are still visible :-)
BoF (Dutch EFF equivalent) won't teamup with any political entity as to keep their neutral stance. They won't be able to be viewed as neutral when they make comparisons between political parties as seen from a digital civil rights perspective. For example, the made a comparison chart how privacy is handled by the various parties (we have about 10 relevant parties here in NL). That being said, they did kept a close watch on PPNL's movements.
"The GreenLeft (GroenLinks) and democrats (D66) have the most pro-internet civil rights stances."
G-d only knows what a "pro-internet stance" is, but I suspect HnNoPassMailer was referring to the fight for net neutrality and online privacy, and against data retention and censorship.
If that's the case, the Socialist Party (SP) and the Party for the Animals (PvdD) have the most "pro-internet civil rights stances".
The best way to measure this is to look at how elected officials vote on those issues [1].
BoF follows a long tradition of our local digital civil rights movement itself being formed by a closed and not particularly transparent "elite". This stems from the failure of the first movement (DB.NL) in the 90's which was killed by infighting (and what some may consider agent provocateurs).
BoF has no grass roots support, no transparency, no members, no accountability, no checks an balances. And they like it that way because in the short term it allows them to be highly effective, so they'll never partner up with anything as messy and risky as a democratic movement.
The problem is, they also soak up the support, experience and expertise something like a Dutch Pirate Party or any other democratic alternative would need to get off the ground.
Interesting. How are they not transparent, though?
I still think they're doing good work, so I'm not going to stop my monthly donation any time soon btw :-)
And about your last paragraph, I don't think it's because BoF soaking up expertise that the Dutch Pirate Party couldn't properly explain their position and ideals when GeenStijl/POWnews interviewed them in a very uncharacteristic positive manner (GS wanted them to succeed, but they just stammered).
And even then there was no excuse for blogging "Big Tits Cause Earthquakes" [response to the Telegraaf's "Pirates Caused Pukkelpop Disaster"]--that was the moment I unfortunately could not take them serious as a political party any more. I get it was a joke, but you just can't do that if you're an official political party blog and your 1) alienating some female voter audience with such headlines and 2) communicating to the rest of your audience that you apparently don't understand that [and consequently, how will they be defending their vision in real politics?].
It's sad because I would have loved to have a real good Pirate Party like Sweden or Germany have.
ACTA means EU would have to use US's copyright laws, right? So if SOPA passes, doesn't that mean US would be able to do the same thing in EU? Didn't EU Parliament vote just a few days ago that they are against SOPA? Talk about being inconsistent.
14 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 36.5 ms ] threadSome statements from other more conservative parties (like CDA (Christian), VVD (classical conservative)) even smell to very, very, very small babysteps in understanding civil rights on the net. Still, too much idiocy comes from them (VVD actively supporting dutch equivalent of MPAA, CDA supporting censorship). But I do notice a slow movement towards understanding the net, and how civil rights should be protected on the net.
And why the downvote below for HnNoPassMailer? All he said was correct. Was it the "failure of the Dutch Pirate Party" bit? Because they did fail. The German and Swedish Pirate Parties are excellent, but ours just keep blundering on public relations, they're geeks with great ideals but they're not politicians. Maybe they should partner up with BitsofFreedom or something, BOF.nl seems to know how to handle publicity.
Moderators (or perhaps some automated system) seem to be quite trigger-happy on the hellbannings. That is the kind of ban where you disappear for everybody else (unless they got `showdead` enabled), but the person themselves has no idea what's going on, or why.
I even saw a guy here get hellbanned for a rather tasteless joke. It certainly deserved all the downvotes it must have gotten and was sufficiently inappropriate to at least warrant a warning, suspension or perhaps even an actual ban. But hellbanning is completely counterproductive in these situations. The guy just continued posting for weeks, completely oblivious to the fact that nobody was replying to him, or upvoting him! Let alone that he had any idea he did something wrong. (IMO a warning would have sufficed on first offence since the rest of his comments were constructive enough, he was no troll)
This is a very good essay on the pros, cons and uses of hellbans (and other sneaky+unusual sanctions such as slowbans and errorbans): http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/06/suspension-ban-or-h...
In summary: hellbans are only useful against repeatedly banned disruptive trolls that won't listen to reason and will just proxy back in with a new account after you IP-ban them because it delays them and they may get bored give up and go away. A temporary hellban is the most useless thing ever, it just wastes people's time and if they are bad enough they deserved that, you probably didn't want to let them back in later. A hellban can be mildly effective to spammers but not much since they expect or detect it sooner.
Personally I've found the slowban to be most effective against the most stubborn and disruptive return trolls (and only those). There's even science to point out that pageload delays directly reduce participation, which is exactly what you want. But the forum I admin attracts those types by its very nature, while in the 1.5yr I've been on HN, I actually haven't seen any of such trolls. The up/downvote system works too well for that (to the point that it sometimes tips the balance the other way into circlejerk territory, but that's another discussion).
This IMO not-always-correct-or-effective moderating is why I have `show dead` turned on, and sometimes when I'm paranoid, check from a different IP if my comments are still visible :-)
"The GreenLeft (GroenLinks) and democrats (D66) have the most pro-internet civil rights stances."
G-d only knows what a "pro-internet stance" is, but I suspect HnNoPassMailer was referring to the fight for net neutrality and online privacy, and against data retention and censorship.
If that's the case, the Socialist Party (SP) and the Party for the Animals (PvdD) have the most "pro-internet civil rights stances".
The best way to measure this is to look at how elected officials vote on those issues [1].
[1] http://www.privacybarometer.nl/partij.php?p=4
He probably meant 'digital rights' [1], which covers some of the same ground as 'civil rights'.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights
BoF has no grass roots support, no transparency, no members, no accountability, no checks an balances. And they like it that way because in the short term it allows them to be highly effective, so they'll never partner up with anything as messy and risky as a democratic movement.
The problem is, they also soak up the support, experience and expertise something like a Dutch Pirate Party or any other democratic alternative would need to get off the ground.
I still think they're doing good work, so I'm not going to stop my monthly donation any time soon btw :-)
And about your last paragraph, I don't think it's because BoF soaking up expertise that the Dutch Pirate Party couldn't properly explain their position and ideals when GeenStijl/POWnews interviewed them in a very uncharacteristic positive manner (GS wanted them to succeed, but they just stammered).
And even then there was no excuse for blogging "Big Tits Cause Earthquakes" [response to the Telegraaf's "Pirates Caused Pukkelpop Disaster"]--that was the moment I unfortunately could not take them serious as a political party any more. I get it was a joke, but you just can't do that if you're an official political party blog and your 1) alienating some female voter audience with such headlines and 2) communicating to the rest of your audience that you apparently don't understand that [and consequently, how will they be defending their vision in real politics?].
It's sad because I would have loved to have a real good Pirate Party like Sweden or Germany have.