I've seen several people on Less Wrong recommend Mencius Moldbug's writings, and I've been curious about how he became so popular here. He's certainly an interesting thinker, but he's rather obscure and doesn't have any obvious connection to Less Wrong, so I'm wondering where this overlap in readership came from.
[EDIT by E.Y.: The answer is that he's not popular here. The 2012 LW annual survey showed 2.5% (30 of 1195 responses) identified as 'reactionary' or 'Moldbuggian'. To the extent this is greater than population average, it seems sufficiently explained by Moldbug having commented on the early Overcoming Bias econblog before LW forked from it, bringing with some of his own pre-existing audience. I cannot remember running across anyone talking about Moldbug on LW, at all, besides this post, in the last year or so. Since this page has now risen to the first page of Google results for Mencius Moldbug due to LW's high pagerank, and on at least one occasion sloppy / agenda-promoting journalists such as Klint Finley have found it convenient to pretend to an alternate reality (where Moldbug is popular on LW and Hacker News due to speaking out for angry entitled Silicon Valley elites, or something), a correction in the post seems deserved. See also the Anti-Reactionary FAQ by Scott Alexander (aka Yvain, LW's second-highest-karma user). --EY]
You might be interested in these two articles. Note that Moldbug's writing is cited as an example of insight porn in the comments.
The "Dark Enlightenment" crowd differs from the Conservative crowd in that the former are more likely to be maladapted people wanting radical change in society and novelty in their ideas while the latter are well adjusted people who dislike change since it is cognitively expensive to deal with. Here is a left wing take on the difference. I think this is a key problem of his readers since it biases them towards such ideas (this includes me naturally). Arguably Marxism had a boosted appeal in the middle of the 20th century among Western intellectual elites because of similar reasons.
Moldbug himself probably only enjoys demolishing Universalism as much as he does because his grandparents where Communists, parents where Liberals and he moved in the university crowd in California, so the ideas he comes up with and the material he seeks out differ radically from what he was immersed in as a child, teenager and probably even now.