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.
Shit like this is why I use ad blockers and route all my home network traffic through a Pi Hole.
If Google gets their way with their evil “Web Environment Integrity” bullshit this is going to get so. Much. Worse.
The whole internet at that point would be pretty much 100% ad and 100% unusable at that point with the “wEb InTeGrItY” bullshit they’re pushing.
Really hoping it fails or it’s just another abandoned Google project, but it’s deeply worrisome for us netizens.
Hey! My husband is thinking about doing something similar with his, can you share any resources you used? He’s done programming before but never with a raspberry pi, and he’s not sure where to start.
You can follow pi hole website to do it https://pi-hole.net/
Very easy, straight forward, and well explained.
The only thing you might want to check before buying something or trying this is if your router allows to set custom dns servers. Basically,connect to your router, and check the step 3, and see if it has the option for it. From my understanding some might not have the option.
Not necessary, but a next step can also be to install a VPN and route your mobile phone thru it too. Means you are also covered on the go, so no ads on mobile too , when you aren’t home too !
This is great advice. The other advice I would give is to make sure the household is prepared for the impact of routing everything through a pihole. There are quite a few things out there on the internet that will simply stop working with the default block lists. Yes, that is obviously the point. But it is helpful to prepare everyone with how to do temporary allows, and have a strategy for what type of things you might want to whitelist and which you’re content with leaving blocked. Otherwise it can be very jarring especially at the beginning.
Thanks for the heads up! That’s definitely something we hadn’t considered. We’ll start looking into it!
Very helpful! We are already looking into a VPN, just undecided which one to go with, so I’ll send this comment to him. Thank you!
I had 2 interventions in my life and neither worked. In fact, they made it much worse for me.
I suggest that you go to AlAnon and learn a bit about alcoholism before trying anything (btw, AlAnon is not AA, but is a program to help non-alcoholics understand what they’re dealing with.)
Your friend is lucky to have you. Don’t give up on them. It truly is hellish, and they’ll need your support.
I’ve found with my own addictions that forcibly stopping one just causes a different one to start up.
The real solution for me has been healing trauma, resulting in baseline consciousness not being painful.
And weed helps…not advocating, just saying it helped.
i smoke as much as the next guy but at this point it would be replacing one vice with another
But it’s replacing it with a much less destructive one, which can be beneficial
Different people react to it differently and for some it’s very positive. It may depend what the underlying stressor is. People who have chronic pain often respond well to THC/CBD.
And it certainly has fewer ill effects than booze.
Many of the programs recommend therapy first. No one wants to drink themselves to death, even though it feels like that sometimes.
AA always gave off bad vibes to me because of the whole “surrender to a higher power” shtick
Same, but the community was great. Being around people that understand is so beneficial.
Absolutely. There has to be some little glimmer of already wanting to quit for them to take the help seriously. I would absolutely recommend AlAnon as well. You can’t just force someone into treatment, and that’s pretty much what interventions try to do, on top of making the person feel guilt and shame which likely is why they drink in the first place. Being able to have a one on one, calm conversation about how the person is affecting themselves and others is probably a good route, because people often do not recognize they have a problem in the first place. It would not be surprising for it to end with the person getting angry and storming out, but it plants the seed in a more reasonable way than having everyone they know cornering them, humiliating them, and saying “go to rehab now or we never speak to you again.”
Source: in recovery, worked in the field.
The guilt and shame is brutal, and shouldn’t be used to try to change someone into behaving better. It’s like spanking you kids, which is illegal now (at least whew I’m at).
Can 100% support Al-Anon. Great program.
+1 AlAnon is a good program. It shows how deeply ingrained alcohol is in our society that we have support programs just for people who know an alcoholic.
Don’t do one of those “5vs1” interventions! All it will do is make your friend think you are “ganging up” on him. Talk with him one on one, make your other friends do the same with some time in between.
Why privacy matters, reason #854203
Exactly. “I have nothing to hide”. No shit. They know more than you
You think i close the door on the bathroom because shitting is illegal?
Best way to reply to that
Alcoholic here. Super bowl ads are toxic. All hail the protective ad blocker.
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 amount of alcohol and gambling ads seem to have shot threw the roof over the last few months. I’m not a fan.
There’s actually a setting at least on Facebook to specifically disable alcohol and gambling based on some settlement a few years ago but they hid it really welll
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You sound like a good friend, thanks for caring so much. The world needs more caring people.
You guys are getting ads?
Make a new account on Instagram and see how much of it is pedo shit on a new feed. Everything is out of control.
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.
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What makes it better?
NextDNS and similar services basically host the pi-hole on your behalf. Pi-hole setup involves installing packages on a device that will handle your ad content filtering and related network configuration; NextDNS involves getting a URL to copy-paste into your phone, computer, or network’s DNS configuration settings. The latter is far less labor-intensive. The trade-off is that you have less control over how things get blocked. Pi-hole is more of a local solution than NextDNS, but if you don’t want to fuss with the tech and just want to start blocking more ads, go with NextDNS (or similar).
Here is an article that covers info about how to set this up on an Android phone and several private DNS provider options: https://www.theupdatebox.com/how-to-enable-private-dns-on-android/
I’m guessing you can’t run it alongside a VPN then, right?
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
