I was listening to this podcast that had an ad for a government system to help out people experiencing substance use (specifically alcohol) issues…directly followed by a government liquor store ad. In every single episode.
My great grandfather started smoking when he was very young. One day he got a call from his wife’s doctor that she had asthma.
He quit smoking cold turkey half way through a cigarette and kept that half-empty pack of cigarettes with one half-smoked on his dresser for the rest of his life and never touched tobacco again.
I’m using the Boost app for Lemmy which has a one time fee to disable all ads. If you’re sticking around it may be worth the investment if you’re avoiding temptation. Stay sober my dude.
Some app devs are setting up their own ad networks, injecting inline ads similar to how reddit operated. I know everyone needs to eat, but it’s kinda lame when most lemmy instances the apps connect to are operated and funded purely by the generosity of random system admins.
I’ve been here a year and it’s great. Prior to leaving Reddit, I was really disenfranchised with their community. Everyone on Reddit are insanely negative, pedantic fuck weasels. Subs were rife with bots that posted the same banal content, and turned into giant echo chambers. It was near impossible to have an opinion contrary to the popular one.
Lemmy is smaller, but our content is great and our communities are very friendly. You get to be you without much worry of some dickcheese jumping down your throat.
Yeah, browsing my own curated subs on old.reddit with RES and uBlock Origin is nowhere near as bad as people are making reddit out to be. Don’t get me wrong, reddit IS shit, but my experience isn’t the kind of shit people say it is.
I always used to use a 3PA that had no ads or recommendations, just my own curated sub list, and I honestly loved that. There were definitely echo chambers but things worked well for me as long as I stayed conscious to that. Then when the APIpocalypse happened I browsed reddit on the web and in their official app for the first time in almost ten years and just noped right the fuck off.
At one point in my feed it went:
Ad
Suggested Subreddit
Ad
Suggested Post
Post from subscribed feed
Ad
Suggested Post
Like, only 1/6 items were things I had actually asked to see. It was atrocious. Default reddit is absolutely cancer now, and I really struggle to empathise with people who are still using it vanilla without any extensions or domain changes.
I only ever got one ad in RIF, repeated in every spot. I think it was an app for organizing decks in TGCs, but as I don’t play any TGCs, I never bothered to investigate. As with every other ad on the internet, I only interacted with it by accident.
InfonityForReddit is still going strong and doesn’t have ads. You have option to help dev pay their fee or compile your own apk with your own key and use it for free. It doesn’t change fact that both service and community is mostly cancer…
All addiction advertising should be illegal… Imagine struggling with withdrawal and giving up, and then cigarettes appear, bam!
Or alcohol - addicts actually need that shit to get through the day. The offramp for these things needs planning and consistency and this is just reinforcing the impulses
Sometimes merely purchasing things is an addiction, one that many members of my family have. Adtech feels like a weapon designed to exploit anxiety and dopamine pathways.