Edit: Yvain, the great guy that he is, is handling this amazingly. In my eyes, consider this resolved.
(This is an anonymous nick for the moment, but this issue needs to be raised and I’m not comfortable at this point doing it publicly under my own name.)
tl;dr as provided by Daniel_Burfoot: “Yvain is awesome, it’s a shame he locked up his old stuff, let’s lobby him to open it back up”. I heartily endorse this summery, and it pretty much sums up what I have been saying.
[Due to some remarks, have redacted the links to Yvain’s blogs, old and new. This is absurd, in my opinion. Yvain’s new blog is a Rationality Blog in the Recent on Rationality Blogs part of the sidebar, and his old livejournal blog is linked to in many of his old posts. So I do not think that it is even meaningful to redact them. However, in the interest of not inciting argument, I have redacted them regardless.]
All of us here know of Yvain. He has posted much great stuff both here on Less Wrong, and on his blog. Insightful, brilliant stuff. If you go and look at the list of top rated Main posts, Yvain’s stuff top’s the lot.
A year ago, he switched blogs, from [old blog] to [new blog]. Well and fine. He had good reasons for doing so, including a desire for relative anonymity.
This, I do not object to.
However, as of a couple of weeks age, he locked his old blog, locking away many brilliant essays on a wide variety of topics. I view this as bad, to say the least. So much beautiful and brilliant stuff, of great interest to anyone interested in Less Wrong type stuff, never to see the light of day again.
What solutions are there? There are a few. My favorite so far is for Scott to restrict access by LW karma, which would allow him to maintain his privacy against the web, while still not denying those brilliant, humorous, and insightful posts to those who would truly appreciate them.
Or maybe you have another, better, idea? Please, suggest it. And whether or not you do, please, if you value the amazing contents of [old blog], help petition Scott to consider finding a solution. We have to be able to reach some sort of compromise, right?
There has been discussion in the comments section here [link removed; but it is currently the top post in the “Recent on Rationality Blogs” section] about this. Please, weigh in your support.
This is my point. This a hundred or a thousand times over. That story, and the story of Emily and Control, and all his posts about conceptual superweapons, and the non-central fallacy, and so on and so on for a hundred or a thousand nuggets of awesomeness. That is why I make my plea.