Astral Codex Ten

Moon Moth

5 min read

Moon Moth

Article

Moon Moth is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between September 18, 2023 and July 26, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “Moon Moth writes : If you look at all 11 of [Elon]’s children’s names”; ""Moon Moth writes :""; “Moon Moth points out that there is a book called A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir”. It most often appears alongside Scott, Russia, 2017 SSC survey.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: September 18, 2023
  • Last seen: July 26, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Highlights From The Comments On Elon Musk
September 18, 2023 · Original source
Moon Moth writes:
Inline links: writes
Highlights From The Comments On Polyamory
February 21, 2024 · Original source
Moon Moth writes:
Inline links: writes
Matthew Carlin recommends us this Terrible Self-Help Title Generator. And Moon Moth points out that there is a book called A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir, but I’m not sure I can give it full credit: it seems to be a fictional memoir by a popular TV character and might be deliberately bad.
Inline links: recommends, Terrible Self-Help Title Generator, A Woman First: First Woman: A Memoir
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
Complexity of thought measures show clear directional reversals on every measure except average word length (which has been steadily declining) in both 2017 and 2021. This would be great confirmation for the theory that quality declined in 2016 except you’ll notice that 2017 is a bit too late to explain that! Overall, I’d say that all four of these measures point to a change which occurred when the Commentariat moved to Substack, and two-and-a-half point to a change which occurred in 2016. To me, the ACX change is somewhat understandable – Substack has a different userbase, different UI and Scott started blogging there after nearly a year hiatus so he lost some of the momentum and norms established from SSC. The start of ACX also coincided with another wave of COVID cases, which in some countries at least will have significantly altered the ‘online-ness’ of the general population. So, I don’t think we need to look especially hard for why ACX comments are a bit different to SSC comments. I also don’t think we need to look especially hard for why the ACX comments seem gradually moving more towards looking like peak-SSC; it took three years for SSC to reach peak quality, so we could tentatively propose that there is some sort of inherent ‘bedding in’ time for new comment sections to feel out and formalise the norms they want to establish. Speculatively, perhaps Substack has a different mechanism for attracting readers to WordPress so the beginning of ACX featured a mix of SSC old guard and Substack newcomers, and it is taking some time for the community norms of the SSC old guard to assert themselves onto ACX. The Commentariat seems capable of self-diagnosing the many ways in which the ACX change might have contributed to a decline in quality. For example, Moon Moth writes: I would posit that, for all of Substack's good qualities, the commenting experience is worse here. Which may be coloring commenters' overall impressions. [Expanding on this in another comment they write] Substack comments take too long to load, especially on mobile. And on mobile, they reload and lose my place whenever I switch tabs or apps … Which makes me reluctant to do anything but skim on mobile. And teddytruther writes: I also expect that this selection effect took a huge bump from the NYT controversy, which drew people primarily interested in Woke War Punditry and not a long series of guest posts on Georgist land taxes. The change which occurred in 2016 (and very specifically April 2016) is much less understandable to me. After some thought, I’ve come up with three possible hypotheses: Scott’s writing got worse in April 2016, causing mass disengagement, which changed the makeup of the comments section
Inline links: writes, writes