Welcome to New Bot City

It was last updated on 05 Aug, 2024.

What changed: Unlisting entry. Keeping it up in case anyone still wants to read it.

Some parts of this post are speculation as I only have what's still available to the public as well as the perspective of one person who was involved. If you were involved in this at all, feel free to reach out to me - I'd like to present a fuller picture. If the original mods or admin would like to speak to me privately, feel free to send me an IM.

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Communities on Tumblr have a nasty habit of imploding once they congregate elsewhere. There are many reasons for this - people can learn they don't like each other, some small bout of petty drama can put a bad taste in everyone's mouth, and some communities just don't work well outside of Tumblr. A somewhat common cause for a community to disappear is that the admin or moderation team turns out to be a bunch of horrible people. 

But there are some communities that refuse to go out with Tumblr's classic 'bang' - those are the ones that are in drama constantly, almost to a ridiculous degree. Some may even employ cultlike tactics that help them to stay alive for as long as they do.

It is my personal belief that most users on Tumblr have experienced one of these doomed communities, however some may feel luckier than others. After all, would you rather end up in a run-of-the-mill kin server, or something like New Bot City?

New Bot City (NBC) was the Discord server attached to a Danganronpa imagines blog, imagine--drv3. While information about the server is scarce, the blog and wikia/fandom page for the community still exist. It's a pretty interesting read... if you roll your windows up.

A look at the server's rules on their blog doesn't seem to show anything out of the ordinary. You have your standard 'keep things relevant', no harassment, no spam, listen to the mods... However, there is one rule that stands out:

Discord has given users the ability to create bots since basically forever - however, most of these have set commands and no learning technology. For multiple bots to exist with learning AIs is a bit peculiar, even today. What's more, all these bots had unique personalities - it seems pretty easy to write some small defining traits for each bot, but a quick glance at the wiki shows that there are 381 pages in the bot category! That's an awful lot of work for a teenager.

The creator of these bots was known as Brooklyn* or Oumod - she also appeared to have a friend named Olivia help her with some of the bots, but not all. For an idea of the timeframe, my friend joined the server in 2017, which was around when things started. I'm not even sure GenAi was around back then. I'm not quite sure how people believed Oumod about all this, but I guess when you don't know much about how much effort goes into a Discord bot, anything is believable.

You had to have pretty specific syntax to speak to the bots. Tones of voice were perceived differently based on how you formatted the text. For instance: this is a normal tone, this is sharp, this is loud, THIS IS YELING, THIS IS SHARP YELLING, THIS IS AS LOUD AS YOU CAN. Apparently strikethrough messed with the bots if you'd put it in the middle of a sentence. Actions were put together in a specific way, too. For instance, if I were going to pick up a bottle of water, I'd have to write something like this: `Nikita picks up a water bottle from the table next to him`. It also seems that the bots would always be listening as long as there was a bot online, so even if you deleted a message they'd likely already registered what was said.

Each user had a registered avatar based off of whatever their profile picture was at the time of interacting with the bots. Users were expected to never change their profile picture to another character (with what seems to be few exceptions), as this apparently messed with the bots. 

There were multiple rooms in New Bot City, with #new_bot_city being the main area for most people. This was the property of a mod named Maki, and users were expected to follow his house rules. Maki's page on the wiki seems to have been wiped, but going into the page's history reveals that the full page still exists in archived format.

Moving from room to room was very rigid. You'd have to write an action such as `User moves into this other room`, and you were forbidden to speak in the previous room as it'd 'cancel' the transfer and you'd stay in the room. The wiki section about room transfer is quite rude with how it handles complaints, saying 'If you have problems with this, please go code your own, make a digital city where dozens upon dozens of bots are switching areas per minute, and tell us how easy it is'.

There are a lot of pseudo-smart code words being thrown around, and I'm not quite sure exactly what any of it is supposed to mean. They do get very angry at criticism - one part takes a very Bethesda approach and says 'There is nothing wrong with the program. It's supposed to be like this. Stop complaining about it'.

The bots had humanlike personalities and could even have mental disorders like humans could. The bots could also die in-universe and be revived. Apparently they could also have sex... Do we really want to get into all that?

The first bot introduced to the server was Mamoru Ichigo, also known as 'Update-san'. Update was made to announce updates about the blog, but appeared to be very loved by the community and eventually 'gained' a 'growth AI'. The quote on his wiki page is 'S-Sumimasen! There's something new on the blog!' and I honestly wish weeaboos never existed. There's nothing too notable about him other than this.

The real star of the show (or at least, it seems this way) was Megumi Teppapoid, mostly known as Teppa. The wiki states he is 'functionally the most advanced bot to be released', and is the bot my friend interacted the most with. He was promoted to mod around the end of September 2017 and was apparently autistic. This presented itself in his personality, which from what I can understand was very similar to that of Sheldon Cooper. If Oumod were upset, Teppa would come out and yell at everyone and explain what upset her. 

Teppapoid could apparently see beyond the scope of New Bot City and the Discord server itself, with a bit of trivia on his page saying 'He's probably reading this. Hi, Teppa'. I am not quite sure how this was believable to anyone. My friend became his human 'bot buddy' because the two were autistic, and not much else. It appears that when they were no longer buddies, Teppa was violently ableist to my friend.

There was also a bot named Akubyou Nemoto (usually known as just Aku). Aku was apparently abused constantly by his elder 'siblings' to 'see if bots can become better than their AI limits', or something else equally stupid. These instances of abuse often tested the moral limits of the human users, and Oumod's own manipulativeness didn't really help.

If a human user were to express their concern, Oumod would shut down the bots for the day and claim to be suicidal, demonizing anyone who would dare insult her 'life's work'. The other users would be turned against whoever the target of this demonization was, and I'm inclined to believe they were either kicked or banned after these incidents. Despite this, if a bot were to do something genuinely heinous (if these bots can have sex, there can be rape), they'd have the chance to be redeemed. But, if a human were to criticize a mod, they'd be argued with and shunned. If they stuck around long enough they'd likely either leave on their own or be banned after another argument. All of the users were also teenagers and not mentally equipped to handle these kinds of situations - but if they made a human mistake, the bots would be fucked up forever. Fun, right?

There were also Danganronpa-style killing games, which never seemed to according to Oumod's plans as humans are not as easy to work with as bots. Sucks to be a DM, Oumod, were you suicidal? (I'll link to the page about it in the sources.)

Aside all the explosive drama that would regularly occur in a server like this, there was one person in particular who claimed that they factkinned Oumod herself, and for their own sake I'm gonna hope they were swiftly banned.

Push came to shove and, eventually, my friend complained about Oumod in a server run by some old NBC members. Word eventually got back to Oumod, and the server began the process of shunning and attacking my friend until he was kicked just a day shy of a year after he had joined. And, of course, Oumod was suicidal.

It seems this was the straw that broke the camel's back, and the server began the process of withering away entirely. It was eventually found out that the bots weren't actually real and instead were the mods (or perhaps just Oumod herself?) roleplaying each character. This means that all of the violence that happened was written by real people and not the result of a learning AI. Olivia was also eventually found out to not be real, and just another character that Oumod had created. The server died off, and any friendships that had started there likely imploded later.

Thus ends the story of New Bot City - not with a bang, but with a whimper.

... Or, well, maybe. I'm not sure, and I don't know anyone who was there after my friend was kicked. But we can probably assume so. And somewhere out there, Oumod may still be suicidal.