TimStr

Those videos are just dogfights, organized to generate clicks and views. I don't see productive debate being modeled there. So I agree with them doing more harm. It's just people fighting.

Are there any other plattforms for video creaters, that are worth considering, to be used instead of youtube?

Here is something from the depths of tibetan buddhism: The oracle of Nechung. He puts himself into trance and performs dances wearing extremely heavy bronze costumes (sometimes up to 40 kilos) while transmitting visions. He serves as one of the primary advisors for the dalai lama. By the way: I don't want to discredit this by saying that all of this is fake in the sense that it is purely performative. I believe that going into trance and having visions can be archieved. And I think that if anyone the tibetans are experts in this. But we still have to ponder, weather this is actually genuine truthseeking or something distinct from that. We also need to consider whats the role of tradition within all this. I am mainly posting this because we wanted to have a thread about the peculiarities that happen when humans start to engage with spirituality.

Here is another one for the shits and giggles: The church of dudeism, a religion founded on impersonating the Dude from the famous Jeff Bridges movie: The Big Lebowsky Practicioners usually go bowling, drink lots of White Russians and wear cozy sweaters. It was founded by his holyness, the dudely lama, Oliver Benjamin. The great thing about this is, that most practicioners have self-awareness about the whole thing being a mockery. Here is an interview with the founder of Dudeism.

I think the issue is not so much, that these things are woo hoo. There might be people with legit psychic or healing abilities. But thats not so much what the question of fake spirituality is about. As I see it, the issue is more that people confuse the believes they have about those psychics and healers for doing spiritual work. Many people think they become spiritual by immersing themselves in these kind of new age circles and adopting the "spiritual" culture. They become trapped in a sort of spiritual performance. For this to happen, it doen't matter if the new age hypothoses or the psychic ability is actually legit or not. People create the fantasies about it weather there is legitimacy to these things or not. But thats not what genuine truth seeking means.

This is probably one of the most sinister people on earth: João Teixeira de Faria, also called "John of God", claims to be a spiritual medium and psychic surgeon. He promises to heal peoples psychological or physiological illnesses by "operating" on their body despite having no medical training. Common procedures include inflicting cuts, inserting hemostats into peoples noses or scraping their eyes with blunt knives usually done without any kind of anesthesia or sanitation. He targets people with terminal illness and exploits their hopelessness. Edit: Trigger warning, some of those videos contain imagery of those operations that are quite shocking to watch.

I am genuinely happy that we are talking about this topic! I see, that this kind of fakeness is doing serious harm! Not only posing a trap for ones personal spiritual developement but also hurting the image of spirituality at large, turning spirituality into a weird kind of hippy cosplay! Performative authenticity. Letting those words sink in makes it clear, that there are some deeper epistemic issues at work here. Poststructuralist philosopher Jean Baudrillard called this the transition from the real to the hyperreal.

Probably the fakest "spiritual" person on the internet: Shanin Blake

Oh boy, this is going to be a hell of a thread!! There is just so much fakeness and bullshitting that happens, when westerners get into spirituality without being serious. I've collected lots of examples over the last year: Commercial spiritual transformation festivals: Trustafarians and voluntourism:

That depends a little bit on the use case. If you just want to be ad free, yes, running an adblocker (like uBlock Origin) will do the job just fine. However if you want a clean, undistracting and fast interface of if you're privacy focused or you want to escape the Google ecosystem alltogether (like me), just going ad free is not sufficient. The youtube algorhythm objetively sucks since a couple of years now. And it sucks for user and creators alike! There are many issues with it. But my main concern is that crappy, clickbaity short videos get ranked higher than actual valuable content, even in your personalized feed. And also targeted advertisement is a thing on youtube, as in getting shown videos, that include products that you're likely to buy. Creaters have to tailor their content to this ecosystem in order to get views, so the overall quality of content steadily decreases as we've seen for the last years now.

Thats definately an issue. Invidious, the outher project I shared (which btw is the service, that freetube uses to stream videos) is allready facing legal troubles by google. And since these are open source projects and anyone can just copy the code, this is a real thread that google cannot really control. So you might be right, Youtube might actually change how it's working under the hood if too many people start using these services.

@Princess Arabia The app is not made by Youtube but by independant developers. Since it's open source, you won't ever be charged for using it. To clarify, this is just for watching videos yourself. It's not meant for embedding them. It's an app, that you would use instead of the youtube website. And if you play a Youtube link in the browser, its still going to be on the youtube website.

@Leo Gura My concern with nano-particles is this: If they are able enter the bloodstream and potentially other organs like my brain, how can I be sure, that they will ever get out of my system again? What guarantees, that those partlicles, don't just stay in my body, making any attempt to detox heavy metals with them obsolete?

If you hate youtube getting shittier you should consider using an alternative frontend for it (e.g. FreeTube). I made a post on this forum about this, today: