These Are Your Saddest Tweets

Twitter may be the saddest social network. No other platform makes it easier to send a quick message of despair into the universe. The hugely popular account @sosadtoday demonstrates Twitter’s penchant for melancholy well, with recent tweets like “depression is now following you” and “btw it’s not going to be ok” that generate hundreds of retweets and favorites. But there is another, more insidious sadness that infiltrates the depths of Twitter, and it has nothing to do with the content of your posts. “Sad Tweets,” a new project by Party New York, lets you view your loneliest, saddest tweets ever. While sentimental music plays, tweets from your past float by your browser below the amount of time they’ve gone without a single favorite or retweet.

In a world where our self-esteem increasingly depends on an endless stream of reinforcement doled out by “likes” and ♥’s, there is nothing bleaker than tweeting into the void. If a tweet falls in the forest and no one is around to retweet it… #despair #existentialdread #misery