Joel Johnson's discussions

The other side of the argument, folks. Read more

We may yet. Read more

We don't log the IDs on Burner accounts. Even if we did, that still wouldn't have addressed the exploit. Read more

Well, the only other option is what we were doing before: forcing one site's staff and readers to deal with a problem to a greater degree than the other sites' staff and readers. You might not like that—it frustrates my sense of one-size-fits-all design, certainly—but there is a psychic cost to all of these things,… Read more

That has tended to be my experience, as well, but we are developing and experimenting on faith that there may be a happy medium. Read more

This will be Kinja-wide. Read more

Well, we believe anonymity is important to people who would be compromised by revealing information tied to their identity. But it does make building commenting systems more intricate! Read more

Yes, we suspect this will help with that, too. Read more

These trolls didn't even use Burners, oddly enough! That's why the solution has to be for all types of Kinja accounts. Read more

I honestly don't know. I expect practically (having a general sense of comments volume) that it would be closer to the former than the latter! Read more

Nothing really prevented a Burner account from doing the same thing before. I'm still sort of surprised they weren't being used myself. Read more

I mentioned this somewhere else yesterday, but it should be here, too, even if it's just a technical clarification: most of these trolls weren't using our non-IP-tracked, anonymous "Burner" accounts. They were logging in using throwaway Twitter accounts as verification. So while the overall comment/groupchat system… Read more

Nobody from Jezebel is going to catch any heat for posting this. They deal with this shit every day; I do not. If they needed to post something in public to get my attention, I'm all for it. Read more

I'm in the middle of this company tech thing, but I want to say this: this is exactly the right thing to do when people aren't paying proper attention to a real problem; it's not something I completely ignored but I obviously didn't give it proper attention, and I'm sorry about that; give me about 24-48 hours to… Read more

I'm in the middle of this company tech thing, but I want to say this: this is exactly the right thing to do when people aren't paying proper attention to a real problem; it's not something I completely ignored but I obviously didn't give it proper attention, and I'm sorry about that; give me about 24-48 hours to… Read more

You dug deep to make a very shallow point. Read more

I'm about ready to start playing DOTA again. Read more

I don't watch Adventure Time! Read more

I can't get into two card games at once. Read more