I've finally come back to put this puzzle to rest.
Various parts of this puzzle were solved by Akumu, Alconja, Autumn Leaves, betaveros, edderiofer, ffao, frictionlessemu, Jack Lance, Penzo, Polaris, ManyPinkHats, Skynet000, and Volatility.
General Structure
Each "section" of characters produces an answer; the size of each section must be figured out by the solver. There are occasionally three-letter strings of the form Mxx
, where x
can be any lowercase letter; these mark metapuzzles, where the xx
is a social media site.
Part 1
ᴜ⪪>ㅂ⊓∋…
Each of these symbols has three characteristics: type of symbol (angle, square, rounded); direction of opening; and horizontal line.
The type of symbol is the same for each pair (starting from the second), then switches to the next type.
The direction alternates between 90 degree clockwise rotation and 180 degree rotation.
The horizontal line is on every other symbol.
The next few symbols are CAVE.
🎌➡️🐷BXFIPF.
Interpret the letters given as semaphore, then read the semaphore symbols off as pigpen to get GUITAR.
♌#㊾⬅️
This is a visual cryptic clue: "#" is "NO", the abbreviation for "number". "㊾" is the roman numerals IL; reversing both of those gives LION, as defined by "♌".
sxrt⑷ni,⑶txsin,r
On a QWERTY keyboard, the keys sxrt
draw out a ROOT symbol; similarly, the keys ni,
trace out an AND symbol (∧). Assign each letter to the corresponding character (s
=R, x
=O, r
=O...) and read off in order of the last seven characters to get TORNADO.
ᴜĆ🚇H11⎕2N⠰Λ
The ᴜ
seems to indicate that this puzzle is a callback somehow. After that one, each of these characters appears in this puzzle's prequel and gives a single letter: T (morse code dash), R (metro), I (rotated H 90 degrees), AT (meta extraction), H (XORed part of the square), A (2 in the 3x3 grid), L (first letter in unicode name), O (braille "rot193"), N (flag semaphore). These letters spell out TRIATHLON.
Mfb
This is the Facebook meta. Each of these items has a body part associated with it: mouth of a cave, neck of a guitar, heart of a lion, eye of a tornado, leg of a triathlon. Order the answers top to bottom on the body, then take the first letter of the first answer, the second letter of the second, and so on to get TAINT.
Part 2
调子密文来自轻打
These characters translate to "tone ciphertext from tapping". As it happens, there is a cipher called the "tap code" where letters A-Z are arranged in a 5×5 grid and indexed by coordinates 1-5.
There are also five tones in Mandarin, conveniently numbered. The tones of the characters there are 4, 5, 4, 2, 2, 4, 1, 3; reading as pairs and using the tap code, this gives URIC.
ririmvdfoʊimz
This is almost the phrase "read removed phonemes" in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but with d
, u
, and n
missing, making the word DUNE.
├˦ᐦ|¡|ıᴵ|
The whitespace in between symbols here spells SWAN.
🍕+👕=💕,👂+🛑+φ=?
This is a cryptarithm: PIZZA + SHIRT = HEARTS. There is only one solution: 96448+31605 = 128053. Then, adding EAR + STOP + PHI gives 4779, which translates back as ZOOT.
⟐̅◬ᐆ⍍
Each of these symbols is made up of some combination of dots (1 vertex), lines (2 vertices), triangles (3 vertices), and rectangles (4 vertices). For each shape, write a 1 if the shape has that symbol and a 0 if it does not, in 4-3-2-1 order. Converted to binary, this reads KEEL.
Msc
This is the Snapchat meta. Just like "snap" and "chat", each answer is a four-letter word that can be paired with another four-letter word: URIC ACID, SAND DUNE, SWAN SONG, EVEN KEEL, ZOOT SUIT. These share a single letter (in the same position); the common letters spell INSET.
(There appears to be a mistake in ordering here, though; the meta answer was confirmed, but no ordering method seems to give INSET.)
Part 3
ẒḦṆṖṢ
Shifting each character forwards or backwards based on the dots gives AFOOT.
⣪⣃⁘┈⡓→▦
These sets of dots can be fit into a 5×5 grid without rotation:
The uncovered squares are the first, third, thirteenth, and sixteenth. The corresponding letters anagram to CAMP.
⛳🦅82{.)}2@49]'+
Since an eagle means "two under par" in golf, this needs two characters added to it to become valid GolfScript. Adding *
between 2
and @
, and adding '
between '
and +
, gives 82{.)}2*@49\]''+
; interpreted as GolfScript, this becomes ST1R
, which is the answer, STONER.
੩陸១൪༥꘢
These are all numbers: Gurmukhi 3, Japanese 6, Khmer 1, Malayalam 4, Tibetan 5, Vai 2. Indexing into the names of the scripts and sorting from 1-6 gives KARATE.
cis¼πx|1U3U5,7
"cis(θ)" is sometimes used to refer to e^(iθ); here, cis(¼πx) should be evaluated at 1, 3, and the interval from 5 to 7. Plotting these output points produces a SMILE.
Mig
This is the Instagram meta. Each of these is a unit of measure, plus a letter. (This is clued by the "gram" in "Instagram".) The extra letters spell out the word ACRES.
Part 4
[ ] (brackets added for clarity)
This is a bunch of whitespace characters: a space, an ideographic space, an em space, a punctuation space, a six-per-em space, a zero-width space, an en space, and another regular space. The first characters of these spell SIMPSONS.
ᥞb∔đ₠㏊ध돼
Visually, each one of these seems to look like a ligature of two letters: the word GLITCHES has been overlaid onto the text NOTDEATH. "Glitches" are bugs, and "not death" is life, so the answer is the movie A BUG'S LIFE.
👸:🍑::👨🔧:
This is a standardized-test style analogy: "Princess is to Peach as plumber is to MARIO".
↴̯͕̹̠̹̼̰
This arrow says to rotate your head right: here, "CANINES" has been written with a bunch of combining diacritics. The answer to this puzzle is DOGS.
U+(🥤-🍵+🍒)+(💷-🎵)(946)
This is a rebus: the first is "cup with straw, minus cup, plus berry" making "strawberry". The second is "pound note", minus "note". The #
symbol (also known as the "pound symbol") is ASCII 0x23; if you add 23 in decimal instead to the Unicode codepoint of the strawberry emoji, you get 🍪, an emoji depicting a CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE. (The conversion appears to be a mistake, but this answer is required for the meta.)
Mg+
This is the Google+ meta. Just like Google+ is the less popular version of many social networks, each of these answers has a less popular analogue: The Simpsons is more popular than FUTURAMA, A Bug's Life is more popular than ANTZ, Mario is more popular than LUIGI, Dogs are more popular than CATS, and chocolate chip cookies are more popular than OATMEAL RAISIN COOKIES. The first letters of these spell FALCO.
Part 5
MMt
This is the Twitter metameta. The four answers we have so far can be arranged in a "hashtag" shape:
Reading around the outside, we can see that you feel the new character limit FITS TO A T ("fits two-eighty").