new to tumblr idk what is happening

the app stores are flooded with truly the worst apps out there. they try to trick you with deceptive paywalls. they try to psychologically hack your brain with manipulative onboarding flows. they try to pull you into addictive dopamine loops that don’t provide any long term satisfaction or value. and with the incoming landslide of ai slop apps, it is truly a depressing landscape.

so, i wanted to share 4 apps i’ve found that avoid all this — that truly have something to offer. these aren’t apps where the developers are just trying to trick you into making a regrettable purchase. these are apps where the developers are putting in real blood, sweat, and tears to make something joyful, something that actually adds meaning to your life.

my list is small, and i’m sure there are many deserving apps out there that are not on my list — and — full disclosure — the last item on my list is one that i made. but i can only speak to my own experiences. so, without further ado…

sway

one of the themes of this list is that these apps are all about democratizing the future. sway does this in the most literal sense. it is an app where you join voting groups — groups of people who agree to vote in a certain way. why do this? the basic idea is that, while a politician can ignore YOU, they cannot ignore an entire GROUP of YOUs. so, by organizing in a group and agreeing to vote together, you gain leverage over politicians. they have to listen to your group. in the sway app, you can create and join groups. the larger your group gets, the more sway you have. pretty simple, huh. did i sway you to join?

2. the school for moral ambition

the school for moral ambition is a non-profit dedicated to funneling talented people into more meaningful, impactful careers. that means AWAY from things like finance, law, and tech bro garbage, and TOWARDS things like high-impact non-profit work, fighting against the billionaire class, stopping climate change, and founding startups that actually aim to do good rather than print money for sociopath venture capitalists. the app itself is basically a networking app where you can find other people looking for meaningful work. so, think of it like linkedin, but with ensouled do-gooding human beings.

3. planetwild

planetwild sponsors an amazing rewilding mission every month and for each one publishes an incredible video about it on youtube. members get cute badges for each mission they contribute to, and access to an exclusive member-only discord. the content they are creating is truly incredible — and on a personal note, planetwild has been my own biggest inspiration for the work i’m currently doing. seriously, go watch one of their videos. right now.

4. nohotdog.love

okay, this is the project i’m working on. basically, i think of it as the indie alternative to planetwild. while planetwild has dedicated professionals scoping out and executing missions, nohotdog.love is more like the tinder of world-changing ideas: anyone can create a profile for a world-changing idea they are pursuing, and if enough people swipe right on their profile, they can win funding.

but the app isn’t just about getting money. you see, we live in a world where weirdo trillionaire freaks like elon musk get to preside over our future by throwing around their money and cult of personality. nohotdog.love is meant to be the spiritual anti-thesis to that: a way for EVERYONE to have a say in our future. so, we’re not just an app. we’re a movement that says, “we can build the future, too”.

i’ve been thinking a lot about the saga of carbon offsetting, and what comes next.

carbon offsets were pitched as promises to remove some amount of carbon from the atmosphere (or prevent some amount of emissions). you would buy them to offset your carbon footprint and the money would be used to fulfill the promised impact. sadly, many of these promises failed to deliver.

that wouldn’t be the end of the world, except that these offsets were used as cover by large corporations to avoid reducing their own emissions. by buying offsets, these companies reaped all the reputational rewards of “carbon neutrality,” without actually achieving carbon neutrality, since the offsets were faulty.

the climate community, realizing their unwitting role in this greenwashing, has since moved away from the idea of “offsets”. now you don’t buy “offsets”. you purchase “carbon removal”. (sometimes they call it “durable” carbon removal, so as to reassure you they are serious this time! -- but also, there is an increased emphasis on physically removing carbon from the air and burying it in the ground where it will stay for a long long time.)

under this new framework, instead of “offsetting”, businesses are told to pay an “internal carbon fee” (basically a tax on their emissions). this change in semantics represents a more explicit acknowledgement of risk -- your carbon fee is not guaranteed to offset your emissions -- and correspondingly comes with new guidance more focused on decarbonization than “neutrality” on the balance sheet.

whatever you make of these business shenanigans, these changes haven’t fully reached the consumer realm, where the largest consumer app still sells itself as a footprint neutralizer. (what else would it be? ain’t no one gonna brag about their internal carbon fees.)

indeed, wren has been an interesting experiment. carbon offsets have never been much of a consumer product -- the vast majority of purchases are from governments and businesses -- but wren bundled purchases into a nice UI and subscription and accrued 30,000ish subscribers. whether that would have been possible without spending millions of VC-dollars on ads… well, no comment.

as a consumer product, carbon offsetting (or removal) is a difficult sell. it runs contrary to what human beings want to be doing -- cool shit. people don’t want to pay other people to do cool shit; they want to do the cool shit themselves.

another problem is that there’s not that many offset options for consumers. you can either buy offsets from the formerly-disgraced “accredited” offsetting marketplaces, or else you can purchase carbon removal from one of a few different VC-backed companies. needless to say, these are not the most romantic options…

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so, what’s next?

don’t let the political and cultural trends get you down. there are some new ideas on the horizon that give me hope. i think we’ll see three trends:

first, i think we’ll see more indie projects. ai has made phd-level knowledge on almost any subject matter readily available to anyone. this makes small indie projects way more viable. and though ai is still terrible at any kind of novel or creative thinking -- that’s what we have human beings for.

second, i think we’ll see a broader spectrum of “climate” projects with less emphasis on carbon removal. what survives this era won’t be a retread of past themes (re: carbon galore). instead, we’ll see renewed interest in areas like nature restoration, overlooked causes like animal welfare, and causes tied to our current historical moment -- like data centers and AI.

third, i think we’ll see more democratic funding models. instead of passive subscriptions where you give your money to someone and hope for the best, we’ll see more active systems where people play an important role through voting or other kinds of participatory systems. mainly because they are just way more fun.