🦋🤖 Robo-Spun by IBF 🦋🤖

🧵⚙️💪🏻 TEZGÂH 🧵⚙️💪🏻

Opening wipe screen: announcing the server death

The shard once called Twitter boots up in memory like a crashed raid instance. The loading tips are burned into the muscle memory of anyone who played it: do not become the main character, do not scroll past midnight, do not read the replies. Now the logo has been reskinned into an X, patches have scrambled the UI, the player population has thinned, and regulators have started issuing fines over deceptive checkmarks and broken transparency (🔗). (The Guardian)

This is not a rational postmortem that seeks a master plan. There was no plan. There was only a long, twitchy balancing act between guilds that hated each other and loved the fight. The only honest way to describe what happened is to treat the platform as a massively multiplayer online role-playing game and to narrate its history as a series of guild wars, bad patches, irrational pulls, and a final ownership change where a high-spend player seized the game master console and started mashing buttons.

This shard had no real tutorial. At the bottom of the screen there was a single input bar for casting text spells, above it an endless combat log of other people’s spells, and around it guild banners, world events and direct-message tunnels. The rest had to be learned by wiping, over and over, in public.

World creation without a magic circle

In most MMOs the player steps through a gate into a fictional zone. Rules are real, consequences are contained. A sword swing is numbers; a dragon is a model. The game is “half-real”, rules plus fiction. On the blue shard the fiction never loaded. The developers deployed MMO-grade rules directly onto everyday life: elections, wars, celebrity gossip, workplace drama, schoolyard feuds.

The result was a world map that looked like a plaza of overlapping chat bubbles. The home timeline was the central hub where public chat scrolled endlessly. The trending panel was the raid finder, advertising bosses and events. Notifications were the floating damage and healing numbers that told each character whether they still existed in other people’s eyes. Direct messages were guild chat and backroom negotiations. There were no safe zones. A workplace anecdote posted in the supposed comfort of a small party could be pulled by a stranger into a twenty-thousand-player brawl within minutes.

The rules that governed this were standard MMO logic disguised as “features”. The follow mechanic connected characters into parties and guilds. The retweet duplicated a spell cast into other parties’ combat logs. The like turned into a tiny buff to visibility. Later the quote-tweet was patched in as a hybrid ability: a combination of attack and taunt that let one character grab another, display them in a bubble, and cast commentary at them while pulling shared aggro from both guilds. None of this was framed as game design. It was framed as neutral communication plumbing. Under the hood it was nothing of the sort.

Character creation and class specialisation on the blue shard

Character creation on this shard happened in a single cramped panel: handle, display name, avatar, banner, bio. Follower count appeared next to the name like a level indicator. Verification, in its original form, sat like a rarity border around the portrait, the equivalent of a legendary frame dropped by some off-screen authentication dungeon.

Over time, distinct classes emerged, each with its preferred build. There were caster classes who specialised in fast news spells, firing out short, clipped updates drawn from external feeds. Their gear consisted of breaking headlines and photos, and their primary stat was speed; being first to tag a topic was their high-crit opener. There were thread-mancers who stacked intellect and patience, creating long chained spells that tried to control the battlefield by sheer explanatory volume. There were reply-tanks who parked themselves under large accounts, intercepting hostile mobs with sarcasm or pedantry and turning incoming damage into engagement. There were meme-rogues who stayed in stealth, watching, then darted in with images or one-liners that could wipe a boss’s reputation bar in a single crit.

Support classes existed too, though their contribution rarely showed in public metrics. Some players specced entirely into healing via direct messages, patching up guildmates after a wipe, sending screenshots, drafting apologies, forming the quiet infrastructure of care that never appeared on the front page. Others specced into logistics, running alt accounts for promotion and cross-posting, maintaining list-curated timelines that acted as private maps of hostile and friendly territory.

The shard’s irrationality showed itself early in how these classes were forced to blend game stats with real life. A journalist-caster’s “gear” was also their employer’s reputation. A comedian-rogue’s crits could open real-world doors or shut them. A scientist-thread-mancer’s verbose chains, later studied as part of a mass migration to new shards, doubled as documentation of real research careers (🔗). (arXiv) Every respec had consequences outside the game window. Yet players continued to reroll, chasing a build that might finally feel safe and powerful at once.

Guild recruitment in the frictionless lobby

In the absence of in-game faction banners or class trainers, guilds built themselves out of shared timelines and repeated cross-heals. Following someone was the equivalent of joining their pick-up group. Mutual follows hardened into parties. Group chats hardened into guild halls. Hashtags and in-jokes hardened into banners.

Newsroom guilds formed where journalists, commentators and freelancers clustered around each other’s casts, sharing scoops and subtext. Fan guilds coalesced around bands, TV shows, games and idols, initially buffing their chosen heroes with coordinated hype and defense. Ideological guilds knitted together through shared enemies, turning every mention of certain names into a raid call. Money guilds appeared around cryptocurrency, finance and growth-hacking schemes, spamming links and boasting damage numbers in the form of charts.

Recruitment was frictionless. A single retweet from a high-level account could push a low-level player into a guild’s awareness, pulling them into group fights they never registered for. The emergent irrationality here lay in how quickly casual wanderers could be claimed by banners they barely understood. Someone who only wanted to share jokes about their dog could suddenly find their handle screenshot into a thread about politics, and from that moment onward every spell they cast would be watched by hostile scouts they never met. The social interaction mechanics Ernest Adams describes for MMOs were all present, but with the knobs turned to maximum volatility and no lore to dampen the shock (🔗). (Amnesty International)

Cross-server raid one: the Gamergate incursion

Into this already unstable shard, in 2014, came a raid from another server entirely. The event is logged in encyclopedias under the tag “Gamergate”, a loosely organised harassment campaign against women in the videogame industry that wrapped itself in talk of “ethics in games journalism” (🔗, 🔗). (Wikipedia)

From the perspective of the shard as an MMO, what arrived was a battle-hardened guild that had been training on anonymous boards, now bringing its hatred and scripts through a wormhole marked by a hashtag. The tag #Gamergate functioned as a raid flag. When it was dropped onto a target – usually a woman developer, critic or journalist – the raid poured in. DPS squads executed familiar patterns: doxing, rape and death threats, swarms of abusive replies. Healers were rare; the guild was built for damage. A core of propaganda support kept spamming the words “ethics” and “journalism” like a broken quest text, but the actual gameplay loop was terror.

Scholars who later analysed the fight noted that the hashtag made “ordinary” harassment impossible to ignore, forcing observers on other shards to see it for the sustained abuse it was (🔗). (SAGE Journals) On the blue shard itself, the incursion taught local guilds something else: the power of coordinated aggro, focused on a single health bar, amplified by a platform that ranked content by how much noise it created. Every success of the raid – every developer driven into hiding, every critic silenced, every brand spooked – was also a tutorial in how to use the shard’s own mechanics as weapons.

The platform’s game masters reacted slowly, banning some accounts, looking the other way on others, treating what was in fact a realm-wide content patch in harassment tactics as a localised glitch. The result was that the shard absorbed the guild’s mechanics into its own meta. After Gamergate, the idea that you could pull an enemy into visibility, surround them with hostile mobs and keep them under siege for days became a standard raid strategy for multiple factions, not just the original invaders.

Call-out dungeons and the invention of the main character

The shard’s irrational engine reached a new phase when it started generating a daily “main character”. No design document specified this. A human resource worker named Justine Sacco boarded a plane in 2013 with 170 followers, cast a clumsy joke about AIDS and race – “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” – and went offline for the duration of a transatlantic flight (🔗, 🔗). (The Guardian)

While her player was effectively AFK, a higher-level account pulled the spell into broader aggro range. The hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet formed like a raid boss timer. Thousands of characters who had never met her, never interacted with her, never had any real stake in her life, poured into the instance, casting mockery, outrage, jokes and denunciations. By the time the plane touched down, the character’s job was gone, her name was scorched into search results and the dungeon would go on to be cited as emblematic of a “renaissance” of public shaming made possible by platforms like this one (🔗). (PBS)

Mechanically, nothing about this dungeon was rational. The boss had no loot table that justified the time investment. There was no structural injustice being addressed, no systemic fix unlocked by clearing the encounter. Players dove in anyway. As one commentator later wrote, there is a world full of unanswered injustice, and people “rally around something like the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet” because in that small arena they feel for a brief moment less powerless (🔗). (The New Yorker) The shard took that feeling and turned it into a mechanic: each day, a new avatar would be pushed into the centre of the plaza, and the guilds would subconsciously check whether this one would finally drop the item that would make the world feel ordered. It never did.

Entertainment-sector boss fights and guild-level harassment

In 2016 another demonstration went live, this time in the entertainment zone. Actor and comedian Leslie Jones, visible on the shard as a high-profile character thanks to her role in a rebooted film franchise, found her mentions filling with a torrent of racist and sexist abuse. A notorious troll with the handle @Nero, attached to a right-wing media outlet, acted as a raid leader, broadcasting taunts and screenshots to his hundreds of thousands of followers. The mobs followed, filling Jones’s combat log with slurs and insults. After days of this, the player behind the character left the shard in disgust, comparing it in interviews to a favourite restaurant that had become a brawl with no security (🔗, 🔗, 🔗). (The Guardian)

The game masters, under pressure, eventually swung the banhammer on the raid leader’s account. From the outside this looked like a rational moderation decision. Inside the shard it played more like a belated GM intervention after a boss had already been camped to exhaustion. The lesson most guilds took away was not “this must never happen again” but “this is how far a mob can go before GM aggro finally pulls them off.”

The same pattern repeated with musician Normani Kordei, who left the shard in 2016 after waves of racist hostility from a splinter of her own fanbase (🔗). (The New Yorker) A guild that nominally existed to buff an idol suddenly turned its damage output inward, punishing perceived disloyalty in ways that made casual fans recoil. The shard’s architecture made it cheap to summon guildmates into such fights and costly to repair the damage. Each of these boss fights demonstrated that higher-level, more visible characters actually had harsher aggro tables and weaker shields, especially if they were women or from racialised groups. The entertainment zone turned into a field where attackers gained clout and their targets gained long-term debuffs.

Permanent debuffs and the silencing of entire classes

Amnesty International’s “Toxic Twitter” reports make it brutally clear that the damage from these fights was not confined to a few bosses. Long before the shard was rebranded, Amnesty documented that women on the platform experienced a wide spectrum of online violence and abuse that had “a detrimental effect on their right to express themselves equally, freely and without fear,” leading many to self-censor and limit their interactions (🔗, 🔗). (Amnesty International)

In gamespeak, large segments of the player base logged in with invisible vulnerability modifiers. A throwaway insult that glanced off one character like a missed attack would crit another for psychic damage. The Amnesty chapters on the silencing effect and psychological harms read like a debuff compendium: anxiety, panic attacks, difficulty sleeping, loss of confidence, all triggered by repeated hits from hostile mobs (🔗, 🔗). (Amnesty International)

A global campaign under the hashtag #ToxicTwitter openly accused the platform of allowing this state of affairs, noting that the abuse was “flooding Twitter, forcing women out of public conversations – and at times, driving them off the platform” (🔗). (Amnesty International) The shard did not respond with a full-system rebalance. It added reporting forms, some backend moderation queues, occasional suspensions, but left the core mechanics that made it cheap to pile onto a vulnerable target entirely intact. The irrational structure remained: the game depended on public chatter to keep its engagement numbers up, yet its ruleset steadily applied damage over time to precisely those players who were not armoured in notoriety, anonymity or combat experience.

Patch cycles and meta shifts that fed the raids

Throughout all this the developers kept shipping patches. Retweets were introduced early, turning every excited repetition into a buff that could be chain-cast across guild lines. The favourite star turned into a public like, making quiet appreciation into a visible point score. The quote-tweet evolved from a minor UI tweak into the shard’s deadliest ability, since it allowed attackers to frame a target’s words in their own border and draw aggro from both sides.

The biggest meta shift came when the chronological timeline was replaced by algorithmic feeds. Instead of logging in to see a simple list of spells cast by followed characters, players saw whatever the ranking system suspected would generate the most reaction. Anger, outrage and mockery were excellent sources of reaction. The MMO’s equivalent of loot tables and experience curves had been quietly tuned to reward fights.

Under new ownership this internal economy was jolted again. The verification badge, once a mark that the game masters had verified a character’s identity, became a paid buff. Anyone could buy the blue border without any real check. The European Union later fined the rebranded platform over this system, calling the purchasable checkmarks deceptive and warning that they facilitated scams. The same ruling criticised the lack of advertising transparency and data access for researchers who might map the shard’s systemic risks (🔗, 🔗). (AP News)

From a pure game-design point of view, this was like turning a non-tradable raid achievement into a cash-shop aura that could be bought by anyone, while simultaneously refusing to log how buffs and debuffs spread across the world. From the irrational angle that governed the shard’s reality, it meant that status became both more arbitrary and more necessary. Characters paid real currency for a badge that meant less and less, and then argued over who counted as a legitimate bearer of it, as if clinging to the illusion that the loot still had meaning would hold the collapsing meta together.

Player-whale ascends to game master

In 2022, a single high-spend player bought the entire shard. The acquisition log is straightforward: Elon Musk began buying shares in January, made an unsolicited offer in April, fought through a poison-pill defence, and finally closed the deal in October 2022, paying around $44 billion (🔗, 🔗). (Wikipedia)

From inside the game, the sensation was that a temperamentally unstable raid leader had been given full GM powers. Within days, he cleared most of the development and moderation staff, reducing the workforce by roughly eighty percent according to later tallies (🔗). (blog.getaura.ai) He polled the player base on major rule changes, then sometimes ignored the results. He reinstated previously banned bosses from old seasons – including the troll whose harassment of Leslie Jones had once triggered a rare firm ban – while suspending anti-fascist accounts and parody characters that offended him (🔗). (Wikipedia)

At the same time he proclaimed that the shard must not become a “free-for-all hellscape” and promised advertisers that content moderation would continue, even as rules were changed on the fly and enforcement became erratic (🔗). (Reuters) Studies examining hate speech and harassment after the takeover reported spikes in certain forms of abuse. Regulators and researchers complained of restricted data access, making it harder to even measure what the new meta was doing. The EU’s Digital Services Act fine over deceptive checkmarks and transparency became the official record that the GM’s patches were not just rough, but structurally misleading (🔗). (The Washington Post)

Nothing here followed a calm design philosophy. The new GM combined an abstract talk of “free speech” with personal vendettas, sometimes banning accounts that tracked his private jet while reinstating loud trolls who had previously been deemed beyond the pale. He threatened to remove the block mechanic, then walked it back under pressure. Each announcement felt like a sudden global debuff applied on a whim rather than part of a coherent expansion plan. The shard’s irrational nature, long visible in its player culture, had finally reached the operator level.

Casual exodus and the opening of new shards

Players in MMOs can feel when a shard is turning hostile. In the months after the takeover, survey work by the Pew Research Center found that sixty percent of American Twitter users had taken a break of several weeks or more in the previous year, and a quarter said they were unlikely to still be using it a year later (🔗). (Pew Research Center)

As the GM rebalanced the world around his own taste for edgy banter and gladiatorial combat, alternative shards spun up. One of them, Bluesky, began to attract academics and scientists. A 2025 study traced the migration of three hundred thousand academic users from the old shard to Bluesky, finding that around eighteen percent of the scholars in the sample had already transitioned and that migration was driven more by political expression and Twitter engagement history than by traditional academic prestige (🔗, 🔗). (arXiv)

Other communities moved to other federated or corporate shards, taking their guild tags and in-jokes with them. The old plaza did not empty overnight. Hardcore raiders remained: culture-war guilds, crypto evangelists, obsessive fans, rage-bait merchants. For them the thinning of the crowd only made the battlefield clearer. But for mid-level and casual players the experience shifted from a noisy town square to a haunted lobby where the same few guilds screamed at each other in front of boarded-up shops. In MMO terms, the game had entered its private-server era, kept alive by the stubbornness of veterans and the sunk costs of those whose identities were too bound up with their builds to log out.

Psychoanalytic epilogue: why the raiders could not log off

One can catalogue mechanics, guilds and patches without ever capturing why players stayed logged in even as the shard poisoned their sleep. For that, a different vocabulary is needed, and Işık Barış Fidaner’s work on the psychosexual development of videogames supplies it (🔗). (Žižekian Analysis)

In that scheme, game forms are mapped onto oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital stages. The blue shard sits firmly in the phallic and anal zones. It encourages endless one-upmanship in opinion and endless hoarding of followers and bookmarks. It rarely allows the mutual recognition and stable union associated with a more integrated stage. Each fight demands that a player display mastery or purity in front of a faceless audience; each scroll through the timeline invites envy and resentment toward others’ loot.

Fidaner’s later text on “Social Media Manipulation Tactics: Exhibitionism and Gaslighting” dissects how platforms like Instagram and Twitter turn followers into voyeurs and use indirect attacks to break individuals’ courage (🔗). (Žižekian Analysis) Applied to this shard, the tactics are visible everywhere. Characters expose their lives, bodies and thoughts as if standing on a stage, feeding the gaze. Other characters use quote-tweets and sarcastic replies to twist statements, summon their guilds, and make targets doubt their own sense of reality. These are not rational debates or well-structured matches. They are compulsive rituals in which everyone knows the script is rigged and still recites their lines.

The daily raids, the main characters, the entertainment boss fights, the permanent debuffs on certain classes, the GM’s chaotic patches: none of it adds up to a coherent contest. Yet the heaviest raiders cannot quit. Like players in Remedy’s “Control” facing the Hiss, they need their enemies to keep their own desire from collapsing. Fidaner’s reading of that game emphasises how the enemy swarms are what give the player a sense of purpose; kill them all and the game ends (🔗). (YERSİZ ŞEYLER) On the blue shard, every guild secretly needs the opposing guilds to keep logging in. Every victory is hollow, every cancellation temporary, because the point is not to win but to keep the fight running.

The postmortem, then, can only end in a kind of anticlimax. There is no grand rational explanation, no neat moral. There is only a list of mechanics that rewarded aggression, a history of guild raids against individuals, a series of patches written in panic and vanity, and a stubborn drive that made millions of players treat this over-real MMO as if it were the only arena where their spells mattered. The shard did not fall because one faction was right or another was wrong. It fell because the game itself, left in the hands of its most compulsive raiders and a capricious GM, became a machine for turning every plausible pleasure into another form of damage.