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If you've been on twitter in or around the tpot space the last few days, you may have seen Aella blowing up and deciding to go private. I won't recount the whole story, but it is in screenshots in the link earlier.
Suffice to say, apparently she searched her name and saw a ton of vitriolic attacks and discussions around her online presence. She claims that the worst part is the "overwhelming hate with nobody defending me. People are ashamed publicly to support me, they don't want to be called a simp or cringe."
Long story short she basically said that she is heartbroken, is "so sad the world is shaped this way," and decided to quit twitter and go locked for the foreseeable future.
For some quick background, aella is a prostitute. She is extremely successful, and has built up a huge presence on twitter as well as a cult following in rational spheres. She does data science work as well, and claims to be autistic. She is polyamorous and openly promotes and campaigns for that lifestyle, as well as doing drugs. Some of her stunts include things like tattooing her name on the body of men who have sex with her, having orgies while sharing details of who got to get in, etc.
A few darker claims are that she pushed her two younger sisters into sex work (one of them, by her own admission on twitter, was doing camgirl jobs before she turned 18.) She has also said some... problematic things that are edging around support for pedophilia, although she's canny enough not to come right out and say it.
Now as I'm sure many people here agree with, I don't exactly agree with aella's views or lifestyle. That being said I am still torn, the world is a cruel place. At the same time, aella has probably caused harm to a lot of others with her lifestyle and especially her approach to promoting it online.
This equivocation points to an actual underlying tension/confusion I have around liberal expression. On the one hang I think polyamory, sex work, and some of the.... encouragement aella has around minors watching point &c is quite bad, and should not be allowed to happen in the public square. I think a certain amount of shaming is absolutely good and necessary.
However, perhaps I'm frail hearted or something because it does hurt to see so many attack her so viciously, when they clearly have so much hate in their hearts. Perhaps it's Pollyannaish but I wish that we could do our shaming in a more dignified, and less clearly antagonistic way. It seems that most of the people shaming her, from my read at least, clearly enjoy looking down and judging someone harshly, seeing themselves as better than her. From my perspective, that's not just as bad as what she's doing, but still bad.
I'm wondering, I suppose, whether there's a way we can employ shame in a truly good way as a society? Can we somehow shame people without turning into monsters ourselves, in order to protect our children and especially young girls from (imo) degenerate and overall unhealthy lifestyles?
Look, I don't hate her or think she should be insulted, abused, dragged, etc. I dislike dogpiles and sadism and gleeful cruelty.
That said, her entire schtick is stirring up controversy, posting provocative things as "thought experiments," and bragging about her gangbangs. That she suddenly discovered that people say mean things about her on the Internet and it hurts her feelings that more people aren't defending her is really hard for me to find credible. She's either having some kind of mental breakdown or this is as performative as most of the things she does.
I truly love this sentence. The first 75% of it is kind of ho-hum internet drama and then it hits that hard left turn to close it out.
And it's 10,000% accurate. Aella is a twitter clickbait troll. But she's "attractive" (sincere personal opinion: she is not). Okay, there are other attractive twitter spammers. Hmmm, how do differentiate? Rationalist community! Pretty good, but I need that x-factor, that pizzazz!
Oh, i'll just fuck a bunch of people and talk about it all the damn time.
What I've seen of her face, I think she is pretty. Not startlingly beautiful, but attractive enough? I have to give her that: she's not ugly and she isn't totally plastic. She's in her early 30s now so starting the waning years of sex worker (at a high level) earnings.
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I'm going to stake a plot in the currently undervalued quadrant of "she is not attractive, and her presence is a net positive for the ratsphere". Her data posts are up there with the old okcupid blog in terms of interesting information nobody else dares to collate, and, well, perhaps it's my first-year 4channer programming showing through but I ultimately still feel that that which can be destroyed by trolling should be.
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I find that easier to believe. Even if we think that she's engaging in cynical performative "oh I'm so hurt I'm going away", it's probably a bit of a shock to find that she's not as beloved as she expected, or that her supporters are not in fact willing to come out in public and defend her. If her simps (dreadful term but it's useful here) are not indeed willing to associate themselves publicly with her, then that's indicative of a threat to her income stream: they may say the right things but they do not, in fact, respect her and when push comes to shove, they may well be pragmatic about "do I send this hundred bucks to Aella or do I spend it on something else" and spend it elsewhere.
For a test of mindless devotion, this is coming back with uncomfortable data that the mindless devotion stream is lower than she predicted and it's likely to dry up altogether.
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Yeah that's a fair point. She's profiting off of the controversy so complaining about it is a little rich.
Idk maybe I'm not cynical enough but it seems genuine to me? Then again some people do seem to think she's a sort of master manipulator. I suppose it's possible!
These aren't mutually exclusive. If anything I'd argue the best manipulators are often those who don't consciously recognize their behavior as manipulative.
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she IS a woman and a prostitute, manipulation is like 95% of the job.
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This comment annoyed me enough to actually make an account -- as I feel a lot of personal sympathy (feeling utterly scammed by parents/school/society in a large way) and the topics of many of the polls read as sincere to me and with tons of topics where the 'controversy' or 'provocative' strikes me with a lot of confusion why the topic is controversial at all, which has made me significantly frustrated when "stirring up controversy" is the framing that some opponent would like to paint me as, when several times in my life I've said things that are just my honest thoughts with no intent to be controversial at all and I'm tired of it.
This gives me a temptation to think "these people are going to call me this anyway, when should I really not care", and with Aella's having an audience and doing this for years maybe playing into that 'role' became tempting. Negativity bias + being poor at taking feedback seems general amongst influencer-people too. So I personally find that credible.
(I do find Aella's glorfifying sex work / crypto promotion stuff strange myself -- but not even the haters are talking about the crypto promotion stuff)
If I understand you correctly, you think:
Her posts are not provocative, just sincere curious inquiries.
She does noy stir up controversy, she's just interested in non mainstream things
People unfairly accuse her of being controversial. You can relate to this.
Close?
Yes -- many of the inquiries I am surprised are treated as taboo as they are, many social 'norms' and rules are nonsensical and often weaponized already, "asking questions" is pushback and not malicious.
Well I can't know for sure how much controversy could be intentional, something that makes her less credible about this is she's done this for an audience for so long, and she 'should' know there are some others who react horribly to her. (In her shoes, I would not be able to consistently predict which topics would offend people though -- just that it would happen and for her has already happened for years.) It seems more resonant to me that she just does have the same disgust reaction / have the awareness of the "normal person" optics -- so yes, I think she is more sincere than others here seem to think.
The idea that my honest thoughts and positions could be labeled as 'provocative' (which they have before) is subjective to the reader, and I am often more frustrated by it than it has ever helped. In my life I have personally kept silent most of the time, which converts it into silent frustration and feelings of alienation about other people, instead of turning it into 'part of my brand' like Aella.
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After observing for years, its my conclusion that literally everything she does, from the weird polls to the bemoaning her inability to find a husband (who would tolerate her onlyfans), to the gangbangs is just her way of selling her services, targeting a very particular niche: grown up tech nerds who find themselves suddenly very wealthy.
If you engage with her in ANY way, you are entering her sales funnel.
This wouldn't be so bad except she likewise bends all attention around any issue or event to be about her. Even this action has made it so people aren't discussing whether her critics are right, now its all about her disappearance from the public eye.
My prediction is she makes a very ostentatious return to social media inside a month, probably setting up some big event she will promote, and then continues on as usual.
Isn't she big into vibecamp that's about to happen? Would be a weird time to disappear right before that if that's her goal, just playing devil's advocate.
One of her boyfriends mentioned on her substack that she had a few bad experiences at in person events. Maybe she's skipping Vibecamp since she doesn't want to have to deal with being a microcelebrity at the moment, even if that's the sort of event where people would tend to be neutral to positive on her.
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