In the short history of the Internet, many have gone viral. But not many have done it twice. And even fewer have gone viral on both ends of the Web's emotional spectrum—hate and love. But I have.

DIGITAL DECLINE, NOVEMBER 2011

I always wanted to be funny for a living. This whole "journalism" gig was a stepping stone on my way to getting paid to make people laugh. As a newspaper reporter in Florida in the late aughts, I tried relentlessly to sneak jokes into my stories. I never succeeded; my editor just didn't see the black humor in a murder-suicide at the Treasure Island retirement community the same way I did.

By the early 2010s, I was a reporter-turned-Web-developer working at the Boston Globe, New England's premier newspaper, named after a city and a planet. Inspired by the city's improv scene, in which I'd begun dabbling, I started to take more risks on the Internet, creating silly projects and tweeting jokes. I wanted little more than to create a perfect nugget of comedy gold that the Internet would love for as long as its attention span ever lasts (on average, 0.0007 nanoseconds). My tweets were generally benign and apolitical. That's because, like most journalists, I was required to sign an ethics pledge at the Globe stating that I wouldn't publicly share my opinion on divisive subjects. The jokes I put online focused on me and my experiences. They still do.

Sometimes (read: most of the time) I exploited the facelessness of the World Wide Web to make fun of others, trying to win arguments by being a cocky dick (double dick? Dickish dick?) instead of employing logic and reason. So what if I was being spiteful and mean? All is fair in love and war and Twitter.

Then, on Monday, November 7, I walked into a Burger King. I'd just finished my shift at the Globe, and I was there to try out their chicken tenders. (Fancy I am not: I ordered a ten-piece—pretty good!—along with a double cheeseburger.) Yes, I was a bachelor.

The fine(ish)-dining establishment was mostly empty. Shortly after I settled down to dig into my bounty, a young, attractive couple sat down in a booth to my right and began a loud conversation that changed my life, mostly for the worse.

They were having an argument about their relationship. At one point, the man stood up and told us patrons about his partner's alleged infidelity. This was unexpected. Perfect fodder, I thought, for the Internet.

I took out my phone and started tweeting. I thought, in some delusional way, that I was doing my job, something noble: I'm going to report this. Like a reporter!

Kevin Colden

My tweet storm picked up social steam, getting attention first from my followers, and then their friends, and then total strangers. People I'd never heard of tweeted questions to me about the details of the fight as it unfolded. Adrenaline coursed through my body, out of my fingertips, and onto my phone—this was nothing short of exhilarating.

I posted a photo of the couple to quiet those few who doubted the fight was actually happening. In hindsight, this was a mistake. (Actually, the whole thing was a mistake.) These were not the Real Housewives of Beantown; they were nonfamous people whose interior lives didn't necessarily deserve to be subjected to unwarranted public scrutiny. But none of that crossed my mind as I posted the photo along with 29 other tweets that described what was said in painfully intimate detail. After the couple stormed off, I walked outside, posted a photo of the Burger King to Instagram and titled it "The Restaurant of Broken Dreams," and walked the two blocks back to my terribly decorated apartment.

I had more than 200 new followers by the time I got home. This is when I had my first inkling that what I'd done could be, as they say in the biz, big. I was genuinely excited; people were amused by something I created. I'd finally managed to make something that existed of the Internet, not merely on the Internet.

The next morning, a Tuesday, I had more than a thousand new followers. My coworkers asked me about it as soon as I got to work. They were like "lol." My boss was like "lol." My online friends, many of whom worked in the media, were like "lmao." No one, most egregiously myself, considered that what I'd done may have been wrong.

As that morning continued, more people read—and talked about—the tweets. A friend assembled them into a Storify so they could easily be read and shared; that post was eventually embedded on more than 240 websites and garnered nearly 900,000 page views.

Kevin Colden

At 1:25 p.m., a guy I had never met but had talked with years ago about starting an emo band in Florida—our premise was Jimmy-Eat-World-makes-out-with-Taking-Back-Sunday, still a great idea—gchatted me: "DUDE. I'm sure you know, but badass." He included a link to Gawker, on the homepage of which was the photo I had taken of the couple arguing along with the headline, "It Is Not Safe to Break Up in a Burger King Anymore."

The blood drained from my face like my dignity at a fast-food entryway. When Gawker writes about you, you take a long, hard look at yourself. The wool had been ripped from my eyes, and I did not like what I saw. Maybe—just maybe—I should not have exposed the personal lives of two young lovers in a private fight, I thought.

Within minutes my boss was at my cubicle; she was no longer so cheerful. She rushed me into a meeting with her boss. I was told that my higher-ups weren't pleased, including the Globe's owner. (Word, apparently, had quickly gotten around.) My boss's boss strongly suggested I stop tweeting until this died down. By now I felt bad for the couple (though I never heard from them, nor do I know if they were ever aware of what happened), but I started to feel indignant about how I was being treated. Earlier that day, my tweets were the toast of the office, celebrated over percolating K-Cups. My boss had even retweeted some of it. Now the bad publicity made it a problem. But I liked getting a paycheck, so I agreed.

Moments later, the Internet backlash began in earnest. Damning comments piled up on the Gawker piece. "What a prick," read one. "Here's hoping karma finds Andy Boyle soon," read another. "I wonder what Anonymous would find out about Andy Boyle and his personal life if they did their digging?" ominously read a third. The vitriol continued on Twitter, where it seemed like everyone wanted in on the blitzkrieg. I received comments on my personal website: "I hope someday you can reflect on your complete lack of empathy for other human beings and your feelings of self-loathing," one commenter wrote. "The fact that you decided to share this experience rather than deal with the awkward feeling it left you tells me that you are unable to deal with life as a full-fledged human being with any kind of emotional intelligence."

This all hurt a great deal. (Cue the tiny violin.) Growing up in a small city in northeastern Nebraska, I was bullied relentlessly. To now experience the same treatment from anonymous people on the Internet put me right back on the kindergarten playground—a scared kid, all alone. Even worse, a few friends pointed out that by making fun of a harmless couple going through the emotional wringer, I was being the very type of person who'd traumatized a younger me. I outwardly dismissed the notion, still grasping at a sense of pride that was becoming my best source of self-protection, even though I know now they were right.

I had defenders. My parents thought this was fantastic, and believed the Globe should pay me to humorously live-tweet events. My boss went to bat for me, which I now know is likely why I didn't lose my job. Some of my old college drinking buddies thought it was all hilarious and that I'd done no wrong. In a Los Angeles Times article about the incident, a law professor from U.C. Davis was quoted as defending my First Amendment rights, in essence saying, "He was an asshat, but he has the constitutional right to do what he did."

On Wednesday, the interview requests began pouring in: The Atlantic, Good Morning America, some Canadian radio stations (our northern friends loved this story), some television shows. My boss told me to ignore the requests, and I did—I was not trying to rock the already-teetering boat. Articles appeared on ABC News, CBS News, and Forbes. Behind the scenes, the Globe's lawyers were investigating whether or not I'd broken a rule for which they could quietly get rid of me; but I hadn't, so they couldn't.

Eventually, the emails from pissed-off strangers, which had covered my inbox like a rash, stopped popping up. The angry tweets faded. The online hype machine hunted for its next meme.

But I'd been given a digital scar. The Internet was where, as an awkward 12-year-old, I'd found friends; where I no longer felt so isolated. Now when you looked me up on the medium to which I devoted most of my waking hours, it told you I was a prick. I acted like it didn't affect me, but I felt crushed. Rather than confront my feelings, I pushed them down with food and alcohol.

The tweet-storm would come up in job interviews. When I spoke at digital-developer conferences, it's all people wanted to talk about. On a first date at a dingy Cambridge bar, my companion brought up the story. "That guy was from here, apparently. What an asshole," she said, not knowing it was me. "That guy," I replied, hating what I had to say next, "was me." No second date.

I almost lost my job. My reputation was lower than the standards of Michigan water inspectors. The Internet hated me. I kind of hated myself. How could this possibly end well?

ACADEMIC INTERLUDE

How does some thing—a photo, a video, or just a tweet—go viral?

Virality can't be planned for, at least not easily; serendipity is usually a key ingredient. People try to manufacture memes all the time, says Michael Wesch, an associate professor of anthropology at Kansas State University who studies the effects of new media on human interaction. But they almost always fail—readers pick up on fabrication, no matter how well hidden.

What connects all memes, from "Charlie Bit My Finger!" to "Damn, Daniel!," is twofold: they are easy to share, and doing so says something about you when you do. Unsubtle emotion helps: "It doesn't often make sense to say something mundane to a large group of people," Wesch says. "And because of that, the Internet often triggers extremes." Love and hate. Hate and love.

Let's look at what happened to me: The tweets were easily shared, either as individual retweets or in their packagized Storify form. And by framing a Facebook or Twitter share in a censorious way—This guy Andy is real asshole, right guys?!—sharers were able to claim moral superiority and still rubberneck at the couple's breakup.

Kevin Colden

Many of those involved in the tweet-storm and its fallout—me, my defenders, and my detractors—have been rewired to interpret our experiences through a digital lens. (This is an explanation, not an excuse.) So when I witnessed a couple breaking up in public, I saw the situation as little more than material for my personal media stream. My supporters were just as desensitized, and those who made fun of me were using the same don't-hate-the-player mentality that I used as cover. "Who were you in that scene but a tool of the new-media machine?" Wesch says. Not the first time I've been called a tool.

The ones who got it—and there were plenty of them—were those who critiqued my actions (as opposed to criticizing me), and in doing so called bullshit on this process of digital dehumanization.

Wesch says that, while the Internet loves peddling in tawdry, lowbrow fare, it also loves the other extreme: inspirational stories. Whether or not we're conscious of it, they serve as a curative—or at least a Band-Aid—for the disconnect we all feel from using such an isolating medium. Underdog tales from the far-flung corners of the Internet can, at times, make us feel more human. Under the right circumstances, they can even go more viral than the pig shit that makes us all a bit dirtier one click at a time.

DIGITAL REDEMPTION, DECEMBER 2015

I quit drinking two years ago. Until that point, I was a Midwest drinker: a few beers most days after work and, on the weekends, as many pints as would fit down my gullet. I never considered myself a full-blown alcoholic, but hooch and I had a complicated relationship. It caused me to rapidly descend from my endearing-jerk default to full-blown assholery. I made snarky comments to friends just to get a rise. I criticized something or someone on the Internet just to gleefully watch feelings hurt. Though I hadn't had a sip that fateful day at Burger King, I knew that alcohol elevated my predisposition toward giving zero fucks. And now, without booze to blame for my bad temperament, I'd been working on fixing my cynical attitude and unhealthy living.

On Monday, December 28th, after returning home from the gym—a recent habit—Facebook reminded me that it was the anniversary of my sobriety. I sat down at my desk, wrote a few hundred words about how quitting the bottle had improved my life, and published it on Medium. To lead off the story, I put two photos side-by-side: one from two years ago when I was a fat, bloated mess, and one from the previous week when I was finally thin enough to fit into a large dress shirt for the first time in years. I slapped an Internet-friendly headline on top—"What I learned not drinking for two years"—and shared it on my various social networks.

An avalanche of retweets, reshares, and page views soon commenced. I received around 30 emails that first day: strangers sharing their stories, thanking me for writing the piece, saying that it filled them with hope that they, too, could quit the sauce. My Medium posts typically garnered 500 views in a week; this one had more than 1,000 in an hour. By the end of the day, that number stood at 6,400. (The story would eventually be read more than 1.3 million times on Medium alone.)

The next day, some of my pals at the Chicago Tribune, where I'd previously worked, were retweeting the link. I reached out to an editor there and asked if they'd consider running it. He checked with some folks: The editors on the op-ed page would love to, minus the swear words. They published the revised piece online the last day of the year and ran it in print on January 1.

If I thought I received a lot of attention when the piece was on Medium, the power of a major news outlet was astounding. The story was syndicated on the Tribune's wire service, and it ran in over 50 newspapers across the country. An aunt saw me mentioned on her local news in Minnesota. My piece ran on The Today Show's site. I went on regional morning television. The piece became the most-viewed article online in the history of the Tribune.

Over the next week, I did radio, print, and television interviews. Everyone from my former employer in Florida to a Catholic-parish bulletin in Alpharetta, Georgia, wanted to re-run the piece. A guy at a Starbucks recognized me. So did a clerk at my nearby CVS. My old boss at the Boston Globe congratulated me on my success. A bully reached out and apologized for being mean almost 20 years ago. (A particularly excellent vindication.) I heard from almost every woman I'd ever gone on a date with in Chicago.

In the end, I was contacted directly by more than 650 people. The stories they shared with me were heartbreaking, beautiful. One woman staged an intervention for her boyfriend. One man who didn't think he could go on living if he had to quit drinking now believed it was possible.

It was as if, with a collective chorus of support, the Internet absolved me of my past digital sins. Instead of being a minorly Internet-infamous trolling jerk, I was spotlighted for being happy with myself. I'd finally given something back to my beloved, the Internet.

THE AFTERMATH

Here's what you don't know about going viral: Afterwards, you're the same guy. I still have a regular job. I still have plenty of problems. I still had to clean up after my cat pooped in the tub last night.

But going viral can inspire you to work on yourself IRL, as it did for me especially the first time around. The guy who live-tweeted a couple's argument was unhealthy, physically and emotionally. He thought that lashing out at others was the way to make himself feel more whole, to show everyone his self-worth. The Internet loves—and loves to hate—guys like that. But that guy sucked, and he had to go. #ByeFelicia!

Earnestness doesn't always play as well online, but when it does, I'm uniquely positioned to say with absolute certainty: It feels a whole lot better. A month ago, a guy I've never met wrote about how my piece on not drinking saved his life. My words helped him when he needed it the most. I reached out to let him know the same thing I've told everyone who has contacted me with their beautiful words and personal stories: He's helped me, too.