Why algorithms, audiences and creators want to cry online

People say they don’t want to be sad, but their online habits disagree. Content that channels grief for views has become a ubiquitous part of online culture. Why does it work?

Whether you’re a state-sponsored disinformation campaign, a content creator trying to make it big, or a company trying to sell a product, there’s a proven way to gain followers and make money online: to you make people feel something.

Social media platforms are called for encouraging creators to anger their audience. But these criticisms tend to focus on content designed to anger people into engaging with a post, often called “ragebait.” It has garnered considerable scrutiny and even shouldered some of the blame for political polarization in recent years – but anger isn’t the only emotion that drives users to linger in a comment section or repost a video.

The internet is full of what some call ‘sadbait’. It gets far less attention, but some of the most successful content on the Internet today is melancholic and melodramatic. Influencers film themselves crying. Scam artists lure their victims with stories of hard luck. In 2024, TikTokers racked up hundreds of millions of views with a deplorable video genre called “Corecore“, where collages of depressing movies and news clips lay over a bed of depressing music. Sadness is a feeling people might think they want to avoid, but the bleak, dark, and even disturbing posts seem to do surprisingly well as with both the people and the algorithms we care about The success of sadbai can tell us a lot about the Internet and ourselves.

“Show any kind of strong emotion – anger, sadness, disgust or even laughter – I am obsessed with the viewer” says Soma Basu, an investigative journalist and researcher at Tampere University in Finland who studies how media spreads online. Creators know their audience is wading through an endless stream of videos they could watch instead. , so it is clear and urgent. emotional appeal can make them stayshe says. But according to Basu, there’s something about images of grief, in particular, that can blur the lines between audience and content, creating the opportunity for a special kind of connection.

Sadbait doesn’t always have to be sad for viewers. Another viral sadbait genre on Instagram and TikTok features slideshow of AI-generated cats meeting with heartbreaking endings – accompanied by an AI cover of Billie Eilish’s melancholy What Was I Made For that replaces the lyrics with “meows”. These poor kitties became as popular as Eilish performed the meowed version of the song at Madison Square Garden in October, with the crowd singing along with joy.

Researchers analyzing highly emotional content on the Internet, be it misinformation or memes, associate her success with objectives for maximizing engagement of social media platforms. theirs algorithms are tuned to boost the posts that users spend the most time commenting, viewing and sharing. The more a post gets a response, for whatever reason, the more likely others will see it.

It’s quite logical – Internet users, like movie audiences and book readers before them, respond to sad and sentimental content, and algorithms reward it. On major social media platforms, content creators are paid based on measurements of how long and deeply users engage with their posts. The best way to reach viewers is to relax the algorithm. Creators try to figure out what the car will promote and get the most out of it – and the feedback loop continues.

There can be a cynicism about the techniques creators use to garner views. But sadbait videos aren’t just about eliciting emotions, they can provide an outlet to feel and explore them, according to Nina Lutz, a disinformation researcher who works at the University of Washington.

“I don’t think it’s a response to the content itself,” says Lutz, “but rather, the content serves as a space that can allow people with a lot of common interests and experiences to come together.”

Accounts in TikTok posts slideshows Blurred black and white photos of street lights with captions about depression get millions of views – with profiles often saying things like “dms are open if you need to talk”. In the comments of AI-generated photos of crying children and wounded veterans, strangers share their very man-made problems in detail. “I read comments and discussions about sexual assault, miscarriages, polio, abortion, the loss of siblings and children, deep loneliness and crises of faith,” says Lutz. “Heavy and sad stuff. Had to walk away from my computer a few times.”

Using posts as a place to talk about problems is an old practice on the Internet. “When I was a teenager, this would happen a lot in fandom spaces or Tumblr, which were also public forums,” says Lutz. “People are looking for connection and finding it in perhaps unorthodox places.”

And while users are having conversations about their lives in the comments of sadbait videos, it draws the attention of watchers and keeps the algorithm clean.

This kind of outlet is especially useful in a world where sadness can be taboo, says Basu.

Basu has studied a particular genre of depressing videos on Indian social media. In these so-called “crying videos”, Indian influencers lip sync and cry with audio reposted from movies or songs on TikTok. It became an entire category of viral content before the app was banned in that country in 2020, so successful that you can even find tutorials video tutorial creators how to make yourself cry for content. After the ban, many influencers who built their careers on viral crying videos migrated to Instagram Reels.

“[Crying videos] go viral because they don’t fit socially accepted norms,” ​​says Basu. Seeing people express emotions that are usually only felt in private offers viewers “a rare and cherished access to something that is private, special, hidden “, she says.

This kind of digital intimacy can look like voyeurism on the part of the viewers and exhibitionism on the part of the creators. But sad content also serves a deeper function, exposing and commenting on aspects of offline society, says Basu. “In their passionate display of emotion, [these videos] they complicate and expose the rift between different kinds of divisions – class, caste or ethnicity, gender, sexuality, literacy and so on”.

The violation of showing emotion when you shouldn’t, or sympathizing with someone across a social divide, is part of what draws viewers to crying videos, Basu says. In TikTok videos, as in other types of art or performance, users and posters can play outside the usual lines of what social codes and expectations allow.

Another factor that makes sad content compelling to viewers is the constant rewriting of what it can say. “New interpretations emerge as they circulate through different social groups. These videos foster different social connections,” says Basu.

A crying video might start as a teenage boy at his parents’ house exploring what it’s like to cry in public, but it can turn into a video edit that an ironic poster mocks, a case for two elderly women in parts of different parts of the world. to bond over stories about their children and a thriving career as a luxury car-driving influencer for the same crying teenage boy — as is the case with Sagar Goswami, one of the Indian influences that Basu studied.

But too often, Lutz says, experts and observers examine digital ecosystems as if people were unwitting participants in a giant attention-grabbing machine. There are important economic, psychological and technical forces driving the Internet’s rivers, she says, but that doesn’t mean users are oblivious.

“People understand that. Everyday users understand the economics of engagement,” Lutz says. “We need to get away from this understanding of a digital audience that knows nothing about these dynamics – they’re sitting in them!”

People on the Internet aren’t like fish in a barrel—rather, they’re savvy consumers who use the barrel, the water in it, and the dangling hooks as tools to accomplish their goals, she says. That may be why much of the engagement with sadbait content that Lutz and other researchers study is “ironic and honest,” she says.

In fact, a popular method of consuming this style of content serves as commentary on the content itself, according to Basu. Users share sadbait and other maudlin posts to poke fun and laugh at it, or even collect them into compilations of so-called “creepy” content.

But to algorithms that curate content, a like is a like, ironic or not. Many users understand that algorithms and content creators are out to manipulate them, Lutz says, and can tell when a post is disingenuous.

But if users engage with a post, it’s still successful, regardless of why and how they’re doing it. Like everything else on the Internet, sadbait content can work for one simple reason: people want to see it.

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