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Agreed. While I find the EFF's general tone to be a bit too hyperbolic (something about their mission and site design makes me think their writing would be bett
by rm_-rf_slash 11y ago
Agreed. While I find the EFF's general tone to be a bit too hyperbolic (something about their mission and site design makes me think their writing would be better served by a level-headed style akin to a BBC article), at the end of the day I am grateful for the work that they do and if they have to be a little melodramatic to spur donations, then so be it.
- twoodfin 11y agoIf serious people stop taking them seriously because of a propensity for melodrama and chicken-little-ism, that's going to make their work harder, not easier.
- tptacek 11y agoThis is a real problem, but on balance serious people seem to take EFF pretty seriously. It's a much bigger problem for Fight For The Future, which seems to be fueled entirely by melodrama. Part of the reason, I think, is that EFF has much better on-staff technical (in the conventional sense and the legal sense) expertise than FFTF does. EFF does get really dodgy in their pure advocacy pieces (these are the "Your Rights Online" stories where EFF doesn't have much to do with the story). They're better in stories where they have a direct role.
- Kalium 11y agoI think this problem was illustrated for us all neatly by Wikileaks. When they released documents with no drama and no fanfare... nobody cared and they struggled to keep the material up. Once they played up the drama, everything changed.
- pc86 11y agoIt is certainly a very fine line to have little enough showmanship that the people already interested just ignore it, but enough that new people become interested/concerned.