I have a friend who’s alcohol consumption has gotten out of control. Me and his other friends/family are planning an intervention and so I’ve been doing a lot of research/reading on the topic.
NEVER and I mean NEVER have I seen so many fucking ads for alcohol in my LIFE. Instagram? 15 ads in a half hour of scrolling reels. YouTube? Ads. Google results? Ads. Twitter? Ads.
It’s fucking everywhere and it’s SICK. I’m researching how to help someone stop drinking and I’m getting inundated with ads for anything from gin, beers, vodkas and more. I can’t even imagine having an alcohol issue and trying to find help for myself with the web being this way.
It’s fucking sick.
Sorry for spamming, i already wrote this in response to another comment, but i kind of find this important for everyone:
First thing everyone should do on a new phone ( or old phone, any phone )
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go to Internet & Network Settings
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Enter “dns.adguard.com” for Private DNS
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Profit: never see ads anywhere on your phone. Not in apps and in no browser.
It’s as simple as that. That’s all you need, in order too block ads globally.
Iirc there are different DNS servers from adguard with custom filters. Some are more strict and others more loose on the blocking.
This instruction is for Android, since it’s what i use, but I’m sure, similar setting exists in iOS.
Any qualms with Adguard being [created in] Moscow?
[Edited]
You can self-host it (e.g. on a raspberry pi) and point it to upstream DNS servers not associated with Adguard or Russia (e.g. Google DNS, Cloudflare DNS, OpenDNS, etc). I myself use the self-hosted version.
It should be noted that setting Adguard as your DNS will allow Adguard to track the domains you visit. The latest info I can find is that a lot of their team is still located in Russia, which makes them susceptible to government demands regardless of their intentions.
DNS adblocking should be the last resort. On Android there are many ways to do system wide local adblocking (with and without root). Don’t know about iOS. Alternatively you can do network level blocking with something like a pi-hole.
What about not using any free services for this? Those are guaranteed to be scummy. I pay $2 a month for NextDNS.
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that’s why I pay to remove ads.
Your friend is lucky to have you. Good luck, I hope everything works out for the best.
You guys are getting ads?
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Preaching to the choir. I’ve been sober for years at this point and had a poly substance abuse issue but alcohol was always one that would always come back around in my life. It’s literally everywhere and YOU’RE the weird one if you don’t drink. Alcohol is a literal poison and it’s so in your face no matter what you do. Things that helped me were friends and family (sounds like you’re a good friend, I don’t know you but I’m proud of you for leading the charge on trying to get your friend help), naltrexone, and completely removing myself from situations where alcohol was present, and leaving behind people that didn’t respect my sobriety.
It was a lot of hard work, I fucked up a few times. Just be there for your buddy, it sounds like you already are but yeah. Come from a place of concern, ask them if they’re concerned about their own drinking and figure out what’s goin’ on. Also, don’t be offended if you get told to fuck off this first go around. If he’s not ready and is still in denial, you will not change his mind and you will be setting everyone up for failure here. If he’s not ready for the help, there’s nothing you can do other than express your concern about alcoholism, his physical and mental health and let it stew. You may find that he chooses alcohol over his relationships at this stage in his addiction. If he wants to come forward and get help, then that’s great.
Also, sorry for the rant. Maybe you didn’t want advice haha.
You sound like a good friend, thanks for caring so much. The world needs more caring people.
I would say the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon plays a bigger role here. Alcohol ads are super common and wouldn’t be surprised if you just zoned them out before.
I am not going to deny that searching for anything alcohol related can increase the amount but I highly doubt it would be by such a large margin.
I searched for husavara images once because we were watching an old b sci-fi movie where they dressed one up with crappy “prosthetics” but didn’t paint it and I wanted to prove that’s what it was.
I got huskavara and John Deere ads all over my socials pretty much exclusively the next day and extremely frequently for a week afterwards. There’s just no way those were there prior to that search. I turned off targeted ads and never saw them again.
I believe op when he says he was inundated with them.
The amount of alcohol and gambling ads seem to have shot threw the roof over the last few months. I’m not a fan.
Sending mixed signals to programmers
!stop@believin
return True;
AdBlocker, revanced, instander, haven’t seen an add in a week
What’s a proper source for instander? Haven’t heard of it before.
Thanks. I don’t know the dev etc., and the below from FAQ about source code makes me a bit uncomfortable.
Why do you trust the outfit?
🇬🇧 Where is Instander’s source code? Why don’t you publish it?
Because Instagram for Android isn’t open sourced to begin with. It means we have no obligations to publish source code due lack of license that would require us to do it. Ask Instagram to publish their source code and then Instander source code might be published.
Open source modifications are not good idea in general, because you don’t want to see Instander with all it’s features and without any credit to the_dise, right? We also don’t want to see that. It devalues labor and it really is demotivating.
If you are technical specialist, you can make sure that Instander is safe by yourself. All have you to do is analyze app’s outcoming traffic.
Since May 2020, there was not single a case of account hijack/password stealing where it would be proved that Instander is directly responsible for that.
I’m all for open source as well.
Instander is whack tho like there’s so many claims of people suddenly following bots, and it’s all closed source:/ we need a better replacement. As of right now though revanced tweaks for instagram is solid, gets rid of timeline ads, but a lot more could be done
barinsta, an open source Instagram third party app I used doesn’t work anymore, that’s why i switched to instander but now I’ll probably go revanced
I quit smoking years ago and I really felt like the world wanted me to quit. Indoor smoking at restaurants was being banned. No more smoking section on flights. Movies were no longer depicting everyone with a cigarette in their mouth all the time like they did in the 60s. Many hotels stopped offering smoking rooms. Nicotine patches and gum were available to help.
I felt like trends in the world were behind me and it helped.
Alcohol is a totally different story. Alcohol is not being banned. It is still something almost everyone does. It is allowed at restaurants and virtually everywhere else. Everyone I know drinks. They haven’t cracked down on advertising in the same way. Hotel rooms have booze in the room for you. Airlines bring you drinks. There are no OTC quitting aids.
If someone has an alcohol problem and needs to quit, they’re really going to have a much harder time than quitting smoking.
I just had my 2 year sobriety birthday this month and I completely agree with you, however, I do think the culture in America is shifting. Millennials aren’t drinking AS much and Gen Z much much less. The social pressure to drink is waning somewhat and I live in a state that has the most drinking per capita in the country.
There’s a lot of N/A beers that have gotten much better to give people quitting an alternative (like nicotine gum or patches). Long way to go but I do think it’s trending in a positive direction for people struggling. I understand this isn’t something some people feel comfortable with - I was very hesitant to try one for the first time after quitting because I wasn’t sure if it would spark the urge to drink real beer more but it’s been great for me.
I don’t see a world where alcohol is restricted as much as public smoking but having alternatives is a big thing for me to feel less awkward in drinking social settings where i still feel like I’m participating in a healthy way for me.
Good to hear about the youth trends. The industry has gotten creative in going after them with all manner of sweet alcoholic coolers and such. I guess that’s been going on for some time.
It does seem that young people these days are doing considerably less drinking, fucking, and fast driving than when I was their age. As a parent, I suppose I am glad for this, even though it seems to come along with some bad stuff like spending less time outside and social media zombification.
Glad to hear that near beer helps you. I have tried it and didn’t find it sparked anything for me, but it also didn’t do anything for me either, and I felt conspicuous with it in my hand. Maybe that’s all better now with more options that are higher quality.
Congratulations on your anniversary! I will raise a La Croix to you today.
Unfortunately, the medications that help with alcohol withdrawal are somewhat dangerous in their own right and need to be fairly tightly controlled. Delirium tremens (the shakes) from withdrawal are usually managed with benzodiazepines like Valium for emergent use and Ativan for prolonged control. The other main maintenance drug for alcohol withdrawal is Librium, and that one is also a benzodiazepine. It would be amazing if there were safe OTC options, but because of the serious damage alcohol does and the dangerous nature of withdrawal from it, it really needs to be closely medically managed. Opiate withdrawal sucks…alcohol withdrawal can very easily kill you outright.
Yeah it’s so hard because for most of us, alcohol is food culture, not so much a drug. I drink one cocktail 2 - 3 times a week, only ever one because I don’t enjoy being drunk, and make drinks at parties BUT also always make sure there is something adult, delicious, and not alcoholic plus plenty of soda and pitchers of water because I know not everyone can just pick it up and put it down like that. But most people can & do. Fewer people just smoke a couple times a week.
Humans have been fermenting things to get alcoholic drinks for a really long time.
Something I’ve seen at some restaurants (ranging from casual to Michelin star) is the increasing prevalence of mocktails. If you mix non-alcoholic ingredients with the same kind of style and objective as mixed drinks, you can make some really tasty stuff.
Exactly. Not fruit punch. I try to make something complex, with some bitter, some sour, some sweet. Young pineapple tepache or ginger beer, before they get at all boozy are good if you aren’t serving actual recently recovering alcoholics as they are non-intoxicating and delicious and complex. Grapefruit juice non alcoholic cocktails are also good and complex.
Chinotto soda or Malta can also be good adult choices for a party.
Usually even the drinkers at a party like the non alcoholic fancy drinks. And Diet Coke is always popular too.
You’re right. Serious alcohol addiction can be an in-patient thing. All the more reason it’s strange how we demonize smoking but not alcohol. They both have quite negative long term health impacts, but I don’t think nicotine withdrawal can be fatal. And the whole drunk driving thing…
I know there is a long history of temperance movements and things aren’t as bad as they once were in history. But I think our current age is really lacking a much needed awakening about alcohol.
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I know what you mean about consequences to other people. It is significant that second hand cigarette smoke can give other people cancer, though. I think that’s one of the big reasons why cigarette smoking gets banned in lots of places while drinking does not.
Tbf, most of the reasoning behind the “help” you got for smoking was because it actively endangers those around you. Alcoholism, by an extremely large margin, affects those around you much less.
That last sentence was one of the dumbest things I’ve ever read.
That’s very much not true. Smoking will always negatively impact those around you, and drinking can be done fine. But when you’re getting to the point where you’ve decided to quit drinking you’ve likely been reflecting on the damage you’ve done to others. Alcoholics in the heat of their addiction range from unpleasant to deadly. Hell that’s why America had a prohibition movement once.
With the understanding that I don’t have the knowledge to say that you’re anything but absolutely right, I do think that the damage assessment would be tricky when taking mental health and social wellbeing into account.
Alcohol abuse absolutely affects everyone around you. We had a friend who used to say “there is no problem in the world that can’t be made worse with alcohol!”
Even setting aside things like car crashes under the influence and violence under the influence - lost days at work affect your coworkers, hung over parent who can’t help out, alcohol abuse harms others, not just the abuser.
Yeah I learned stuff was spying on my voice because I was talking to my wife about how I need to take a break from drinking for a bit to recalibrate my habits and then for several days literally nothing but alcohol ads. No searches were made.
If they can’t resist doing this then maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to advertise alcohol.
It’s possible that she looked up information about cutting down on drinking, and because you’re connected in the ad network system, you also got ads from it. They like to learn who is connected to who and target ads that way. Facebook is, as you might predict, one of the most notorious.
Na, it’s parsed from conversations. I don’t know why everyone always tries to explain the connection when it’s quite obvious your phone is designed to use your spoken words for ads.
It’s not. On the one hand is however many people saying “it’s obvious!” and on the other hand is no evidence of network traffic transmitting audio data. Why spend all the power to transmit audio, autotranscribe, and parse for specific keywords when they already track your browsing habits and those of your housemates?
It’s decoded on the device with the dedicated audio processor built into every smartphone since about 2010.
Is there any proof of this?
Listening to, and understanding, everything said within range of the phone should use noticeable processing power.
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I disagree. Consider the average internet user and how much they willingly give up about themselves online. Most of them use social media and have everyone they’ve ever met added on it, they post directly about what they’re doing and often who they’re doing it with, and they lend their engagement at things they like. They use Google for a search engine and don’t block ads.
So really, for the probably 80-90%+ of the population that captures, the massive surveillance network in place just at that level is perfectly sufficient to gleam anything they might want to know. Even if someone does protect their privacy, people they’re connected with still influence their profile through their lack of concern for privacy.
So really, with all that in place, what’s the incentive to have a top secret voice surveillance system built on top of all that? It would destroy the market for any phone doing it if it was ever proven. Why take that risk when you can get everything you want from all those other sources instead?
Also, his purchases of alcohol may have made it to an advertiser. He may simply not have noticed he was getting ads until his wife talked to him about drinking too much.
The whole “phones are listening all the time” thing could be true, and wouldn’t surprise me, but to my knowledge no hacker or privacy monitor has ever found evidence that they do. Always just seemed more likely to me that people just expose information without realizing these systems are much more ubiquitous and complex than just microphones illegally listening.
Yeah if I didn’t trust her to tell me specifically if she’d done it I’d’ve thought that. But she’s been there in the past herself and was less concerned than I was. Also she’d’ve definitely told me when I complained about the ads
Bless you for using two different double contractions
I’dn’t’ve even noticed if you’d’nt mentioned it lol
There could also be cues from the rest of your observable behavior even if it wasn’t explicitly searched for. They have a lot of data to work with and your circumstances probably aren’t unique, maybe there are signs they are aware of that you wouldn’t be.
If you don’t block ads and you type things into searches about alcohol you will indeed get a lot of alcohol ads. The thing is though, I never got them as frequently when I was still drinking, or maybe never noticed them. Also I once got served ads for beer on a page about quitting booze lol, it seems pretty intentional even though it’s most likely not that targeted.
Just as a note to OP, some levels of alcohol addiction are so deep that they cannot be halted at once without risk to the addict’s health or even life. If you suspect your friend could be that far gone, it requires medical intervention.
Gonna hijack this comment to say I was a major alcoholic drinking bottles of vodka every day, always drinking. Never not drinking. You get the idea. A real piece of shit. Anyway I got drunk and did a bunch of acid my friend had and decided while totally fucked on it that I had to quit. A few days later after talking to some family I called my doctor and he referred me to a nearby hospital with a separate chemical dependency area and they helped me medical detox (outpatient at home) and it is the single best thing I ever did for myself. 7 and a half years sober. Life has only got better since then. I had almost nothing, barely showed up to work, blew all my money on alcohol and other drugs, and now after years of hard work I own my own small business and am doing well for myself.
Anyone currently struggling with alcoholism, ask some friends and family for help, speak to your doctor, and get better. You know you want to.
Congratulations on those 7.5 years! What a great story.
The founder of Alcoholics Anonymous considered LSD to be a great tool to help alcoholics recover. Thank goodness you had that LSD! It changed your life!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/aug/23/lsd-help-alcoholics-theory
Don’t listen to what AA says tho. They are religious nuts and their practices have no basis in science.
AA is not for everyone. Myself included.
Agreed.
Don’t take it as an instruction to do LSD as a way to stop addiction - follow instruction given to you by a doctor first
A Dr will never prescribe LSD lol
