Life didn’t end well for the internet’s first-ever paid influencer. In the aughts, Heather Armstrong was a superstar of the burgeoning social-media world—a “mommy blogger” whose warts-and-all diary entries about the messiness of modern motherhood drew as many as 8.5 million eyeballs to her personal website, Dooce.com. She leveraged that readership into unprecedented sponsored-content deals with Verizon and other brands, which paid her in cash and free swag to hawk their wares. For a short while, at least.
Armstrong flamed out in 2015. This April, she published a final blog post on Dooce.com that hinted at the darkness underneath it all. “Everywhere I looked, I saw nothing but my own worthlessness,” she confessed, a month before she took her own life at the age of 47. Few people read it, because the attention economy’s gaze has long since pivoted from personal blogs to tweets, TikToks, and Instagram stories.
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