the tone changes throughout, mostly towards a happy melancholy if that helps

Try some Anime with some more mature intrigue:

• Apothecary Diaries (Detective series from a medical/herbalogical perspective)
• Frieren (the aftermath of being an immortal and watching your friends die)

HackerNews does something similar where new users don’t have the ability to down vote until they have earned enough upvotes from other users.

We could extend that, and literally not allow upvotes to properly register if the user is too new. The vote would still show on the comment/post, but the ranking of the comment/post will only be influenced by seasoned users. That way, users could scroll down a thread, see a very highly upvoted comment bang in the middle, and think for themselves “huh, probably bots”.

Very hierarchical solution, heavily reliant on the mods not playing favourites or having their own agenda.

Though the developer could not get it to do that in his own testing

They control the narrative to who we are to the outside world. Likening ourselves to mindless Lemmings, does no one any favours. It just takes one incident to kill a movement. Remember the dog-walking fiasco?

Lemmings

The media will use it to ridicule us.

Fedizen

I like the idea of it. I’ll probablyy shorten it to “hey fez” as a way of referring to both a singular person and a group.

But not too random, since some instances ate brand new and there’s no guarantee they’ll stay up, which might put off new users looking for something stable.