From the controversial @sosadtoday to the quote-repurposing dead poet @itssylviaplath—“The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow, lap at my back ineluctably," from just yesterday—unhappiness on Twitter resonates. Maybe the popularity of these accounts reflects the way the privileged fetishize depression; maybe the way these accounts' tweets circulate points to some essential gloom at the heart of web-based communication. I don't know, but something's there. On the brighter side of sad is this new site, Sad Tweets: with your authorization, it plays a maudlin tune while slideshowing through tweets of yours that, for months and sometimes years, have languished with no favs, no retweets—the loneliest tweets of all.
Watching my failures flash by, I was first dejected, but then emboldened. Confronted with an unheralded gem, I'm reminded: sometimes you're your own best audience. Sometimes the one who makes you laugh is you, sometimes it's you who makes you cry. That's a lonely realization, kind of; narcissistic, borderline. But in the end, seeing the unpopularity of things you do, and still feeling good about them, can be really empowering, particularly on a modern-day internet that knocks you over the head with positive reinforcement. Like a lot of things that are good in life, Sad Tweets is sad, and that it can be surprisingly happy.