What's the "tumbleweed" in tumbleweed badge?

The notion of the loneliness of the tumbleweed in the U.S. West is captured by the song "Tumbleweed," by Douglas Van Arsdale (made famous by Joan Baez):

I feel like a lonesome tumbleweed/rolling across an open plain,/I feel like something nobody needs/I feel my life drifting away,/drifting away -

I feel like a broken wagon wheel/when I can't hop a slow-moving train/Think I know how a coyote feels/when he's howling just to/ease the pain, since he's been away.

Lord, I feel like rolling,/rolling along, so keep your big/wind blowing till all my natural/days are gone -/till my days are all gone.

I'm just a lonesome tumbleweed/turning end over end./Once I pulled all my roots free/I became a slave to the wind,/a slave to the wind.

So it is a sad and lonely feeling (according to the badge namers at Stack Exchange) when you ask a question and few people see it and no one responds to it.

Interesting tumbleweed fact: Although tumbleweeds of various plant families are common in parts of the United States (some of them native to North America), one of the largest and in some places most prevalent species west of the Mississippi River is not native to the New World; rather, it is a Eurasian species also known as the Russian Thistle (Kali tragus) and (perhaps most evocatively) as the "wind witch."

Wikipedia's general article on tumbleweeds ends with a discussion of the symbolism of the plant that seems relevant to the current discussion:

The tumbleweed's association with the Western film genre has led to a highly symbolic meaning in visual media. It has come to represent locations that are desolate, dry, and often humorless, with few or no occupants. A common use is when characters encounter a long abandoned or dismal-looking place: a tumbleweed will be seen rolling past, often accompanied by the sound of a dry, hollow wind. This is sometimes used for comic effect in locations where tumbleweeds are not expected, but the emptiness is obvious.

As with the sound of crickets, tumbleweeds can also be shown to emphasize an awkward silence after a bad joke or a character otherwise making an absurd declaration, with the aforementioned sound of wind and the plant rolling past in the background.

The awkward silence memorialized by Stack Exchange's tumbleweed badge is the emptiness of the page where the question has been posted but no one has answered it, commented on it, or voted on it for a full week. Bury me not on the lone prairie.

A tumbleweed is an object often shown in Western movies, or (maybe even more often) in parodies of such movies to show that a place is desolated and empty. It is a broken off piece of bush which the wind rolls around. This shows that a place is lonely, sad and there's nothing but howling wind around there.

So, in the context of a question on StackExchange, a tumbleweed indicates a desolated question which attracts no one's attention.

Self-explanatory:

_{Image source: genius.com}

See Weeds and Literature Collier's 27 March 1915, page 15

The tumbleweed was a humble little plant... not yet wept, honored or sung. It had no chance.

This is in the context of why Mark Twain ignored tumbleweeds in his writing.

Tumbleweed is a weed that tumbles across the prairie in the wind.

OED

The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as the name in U.S. for various plants which form a globular bush which in late summer is broken off and rolled about by the wind; a rolling weed.

Their first quotation:

1887 Amer. Naturalist 21 930 Amarantus albus, the common tumble-weed.

An antedating

But here's an antedating from The New England Farmer: Devoted to Agriculture, Horticulture, and its Kindred Arts and Sciences (Boston, Jaunary 1858, Vol. X, No. 1):

A VEGETABLE CURIOSITY--THE TUMBLE WEED.

Among all the examples chosen from the innumerable productions of nature to illustrate natural theology, I do not recollect to have seen the tumble weed, at it is commonly called, (I have not looked out the botanical name,) and yet if it is not a speaking witness, it is a living, moving witness that there is an intelligent creature. These may be seen moving across almost any of large western fields in the fall of the year, and remain all winter in the corners of the fences as if stationed to remind the passer-by that there is a God. I have just brought one of these weeds into my study. It is of the common form, and a little above the common size. It resembles a gooseberry bush, or it is of the general form and size of a farmer's corn-basket, and so nearly round or globular that a light wind will roll or tumble it along upon the ground, dropping its countless seeds all the way. And nature has not only given it this self-threshing and self-sowing power, but has connected with it a provision for getting loose. The strong thick root becomes so weak about an inch below ground, just as the weed gets ripe that a light wind will hurl it about in every direction.