Mastodawn

justforfun Jan 2

CORRECTION!
Turns out the Reddit post I shared isn’t credible so I’m retracting screenshots.
These things only distract from the real issues, which are serious enough on their own.

I do believe the exploitation & manipulation concerns are legitimate though.
The Human Rights Watch’s report does lay out thoroughly, how platforms exploit workers, underpay them, & avoid responsibility -all while framing it as progress.

Worth a read even if the whistleblower post was fake

https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithmic-wage-and-labor-exploitation-in-platform-work-in-the-us

The Gig Trap

The 155-page report, “The Gig Trap: Algorithmic, Wage and Labor Exploitation in Platform Work in the US” focuses on seven major companies operating in the US: Amazon Flex, DoorDash, Favor, Instacart, Lyft, Shipt, and Uber. These companies claim to offer gig workers “flexibility” but often end up paying them less than state or local minimum wages. Six of the seven companies use algorithms with opaque rules to assign jobs and determine wages, meaning that workers do not know how much they will be paid until after completing the job.

Human Rights Watch

Amir Khan Jan 2

Here’s the original (debunked) Reddit post. https://www.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_developer_for_a_major_food_delivery_app_the/

Hausgeist Jan 2

@amirbkhan Could you include that link in the topmost post to make it easier to discover for visually impaired folks? Die Alttext on the screenshots doesn't do it justice.

@amirbkhan icymi @pluralistic

@amirbkhan thats crazy

EndicottRoad59 Jan 2

@amirbkhan And the worst part is that the whistleblower fears for his life and that of his family.

november 🀄 in my mahjong era Jan 2

@amirbkhan gig workers have been saying this for years but NOW people listen

AtlantaGeorgia Jan 2

@november @amirbkhan all big companies are skimming off the top and they’ve paid off the right people to make this “legal” even when it’s actually illegal. Door dash/uber/etc aren’t sustainable once the general population people figure out they have the control

@november @amirbkhan isnt this easy testable? like a driver is thinking "why i never get tip" so he makes an order with tip and delivers to himself. no tip, lawsuit

november 🀄 in my mahjong era Jan 2

@utf_7 @amirbkhan they didn't say drivers don't get tips, they said the algorithm lowers the driver's base pay if it determines you will tip

@november @amirbkhan oh, yeah i fucked up at reading

So what service is he talking about?

Amir Khan Jan 2

@kbsez they did not mention the name obviously. Just a well known food delivery app service. You can take a guess which ones fit the shoe.

@amirbkhan My aunt gave me a $200 Doordash gift card for my birthday, I tried it once and it was terrible. The food was cold, it did not feel good to make some desperate person do my dirty work and ultimately I was eating alone. I still have $160 left and Doordash spams me with emails every day trying to convince me to hand it over. 😊

Octopi Wall Street Jan 2

@amirbkhan @pluralistic The principal problem with modern capitalism is that there's more work to do than a single Luigi Mangione can handle.

SuperSpaceFan Jan 2

@amirbkhan I'd like to know which service this is so I can avoid it like my life depended on it.

@SuperSpaceFan @amirbkhan @blogdiva If you think there’s a “good” food delivery gig service that doesn’t mistreat its workers, I’m afraid you are mistaken.

SuperSpaceFan Jan 2

@garland I'd just like to know which delivery service is being discussed here. What I won't do is debate about my choices.

@amirbkhan @blogdiva

Amir Khan Jan 2

@SuperSpaceFan @garland @blogdiva hasn’t been stated by the author but most people figure it’s DoorDash.

Russian warship go **** yourself

@SuperSpaceFan Isn’t it reasonable to assume that all of the delivery service, and probably all gig work companies are doing this?

SuperSpaceFan Jan 6

@hozhoogoo Welp, it turns out, the entire story was a crock of shit anyway.

https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked

Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit

A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5

Platformer

Russian warship go **** yourself

@SuperSpaceFan Dang

Amir Khan Jan 6

@SuperSpaceFan @hozhoogoo

Updated my original post to correct this.
Fake and not credible - I agree.
Entirely a crock of shit? I don’t fully agree. The gig industry is known for its unethical practices - I think that’s why such a post resonated.

When I was tightening up my budget over a year ago, the first thing I did was eliminate third party delivery

It's default adding $10-$20 to your cost just by using it

If I ordered food, I picked it up myself or went with a place with their own delivery drivers.

But like, they weren't even giving all that fucking extra money to the drivers? And they gamed their workers so they could give them as little as possible?
Sounds like another typical corporate extraction scheme to me....

the gripe ibis Jan 2

@amirbkhan ah, more of the behaviour that is incentivised by what i am told is the best system in the world.

JaneraTiciano Jan 2

@amirbkhan always 👏 tip 👏 in 👏 CASH! 👏
I'm tired of repeating decades old knowledge every few weeks, but it has always been known that if you tip cashless the individual worker is at the mercy of the employer to receive anything. Cash tipping is how you actually tip.
Get the fucking cash and give it to the driver at the door. Damn it.

DJGummikuh Jan 3

@JaneraTiciano @amirbkhan that is what the OP talekd about. If you as a customer are expected (by some heuristic) to pay a high tip, they lower the base pay to the driver to compensate for that and subsidize their own business. So if the determine you will pay e.g. 15$ in Tip, the driver gets a base pay of 2$ from fhem. If they determine you're broke, they give them 8$. That difference means, that the 15$ tip guy essentially pays 6$ indirectly to the company

JaneraTiciano Jan 3

@DJGummikuh @amirbkhan well. You know how they can't track cash? If I only ever tip in cash I'm the most stingy asshole to their algorithm. I never tip.
Because they can't track my tip. I give my tip to the drivers in cash. Always.
(also I'm actually in Europe in a country with strict minimal wage laws that can't be circumvented like that, but that's not what's important in this discussion.)

@amirbkhan add a customer I can tell you this feels terrible, but since the other part of the playbook is to use VC funding to buy out the competition and price dump to sink those who won't sell until you get a monopoly, there's generally nothing we can do about it.

@amirbkhan that person should have left out the part about when they gave their 2 weeks, it’s a bit of a giveaway if anyone from said companies want to trace that back :/

DJGummikuh Jan 3

@pekan @amirbkhan no way to corroborate if its true, also I assume corporate has quite a high churn-out rate

Alexandra Jusino Jan 3

@amirbkhan moral of the story dont use these companies. Call the restaurant directly, pick it up
Yourself or cook at home. It could be DoorDash but there are others, and now you know they aren’t treating their workers properly. Dot use any of them anymore because you now know what is going on. Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. Don’t become part of the scam.

@amirbkhan
@coastgnu

alt.txt
OCR by ImageToolbox

Trowaway_whistleblow

I'm a developer for a major food delivery app.
The 'Priority Fee' and 'Driver Benefit Fee' go 100% to the company. The driver sees $0 of it.

I'm posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. don't care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me. I've been sitting on this for about eight months, just watching the code getting pushed to production, and I can't sleep at night knowing I helped build this machine.

You guys always suspect the algorithms are rigged against you, but the reality is actually so much more depressing than the conspiracy theories. I'm a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of "human assets" (that's literally what they call drivers in the database schemas). They talk about these people like they are resource nodes in a video game, not fathers and mothers trying to pay rent.

First off, the "Priority Delivery" is a total scam. It was pitched to us as a "psychological value add." Like I said in the title, when you pay that extra $2.99, it changes a boolean flag in the order JSON, but the dispatch logic literally ignores it. It does nothing to speed you up.

We actually ran an A/B test last year where we didn't speed up the priority orders, we just purposefully delayed non- priority orders by 5 to 10 minutes to make the Priority ones "feel" faster by comparison. Management loved the results. We generated millions in pure profit just by making the standard service worse, not by making the premium service better.

But the thing that actually makes me sick—and the main reason I'm quitting—is the "Desperation Score." We have a hidden metric for drivers that tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior.

If a driver usually logs on at 10 PM and accepts every garbage $3 order instantly without hesitation, the algo tags them as "High Desperation." Once they are tagged, the system then deliberately stops showing them high-paying orders. The logic is: "Why pay this guy $15 for a run when we know he’s desperate enough to do it for $6?" We save the good tips for the "casual" drivers to hook them in and gamify their experience, while the full-timers get grinded into dust.

Then there is the "Benefit Fee." You've probably seen that $1.50 "Regulatory Response Fee" or "Driver Benefits Fee" that appeared on your bill after the recent labor laws passed. The wording is designed to make you feel like you're helping the worker.

In reality, that money goes straight to a corporate slush fund used to lobby against driver unions. We have a specific internal cost center for "Policy Defense," and that fee feeds directly into it. You are literally paying for the high-end lawyers that are fighting to keep your delivery guy homeless.

And regarding tips, we're essentially doing Tip Theft 2.0. We don't "steal" them legally anymore because we got sued for that. Instead, we use predictive modeling to dynamically lower the base pay.

If the algo predicts you are a "high tipper" and you'll likely drop $10, it offers the driver a measly $2 base pay. If you tip $0, it offers them $8 base pay just to get the food moved. The result is that your generosity isn't rewarding the driver; it's subsidizing us. You're paying their wage so we don't have to.

I'm drunk and I'm angry. Ask me anything before this gets taken down.

BigHeadMode Jan 5

@amirbkhan This story is fake, can you delete it? https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/an-ai-generated-reddit-post-fooled

An AI-Generated Reddit Post Fooled the Internet. It Was Half of a Scam.

I traded Signal messages with someone purporting to have serious dirt on Uber. They used AI to make the whole thing up.

Hard Reset

Paul Cantrell Jan 6

@amirbkhan
Turned out to be a hoax:

https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/

A cool thing about Mastodon is that if you edit your OP, people who boosted will get notified of the correction! It’s a great way to nip disinformation in the bud.

Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit

A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5

Platformer

Amir Khan Jan 6

@inthehands updated and revised.

@amirbkhan
This story is a fake. Might I suggest removing it or editing to add the truth?

https://www.theverge.com/news/855328/viral-reddit-delivery-app-ai-scam

That viral Reddit post about food delivery apps was an AI scam

DoorDash and Uber Eats both deny the allegations in the viral Reddit “confession” post about a “major food delivery app,” and the post is likely AI slop.

The Verge

Amir Khan Jan 6

@bobkmertz updated and revised. Thanks.

Pax Ahimsa Gethen Jan 6

@caseynewton has debunked this as a hoax:

https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/

Debunking the AI food delivery hoax that fooled Reddit

A “whistleblower” tried to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. This is how I caught him. PLUS: Grok's image-generation crisis, and the rapture over Claude Opus 4.5

Platformer

Kevin Russell Jan 6

Hooray all the way. Mastodon editing and reposting is brill.

the gripe ibis Jan 6

@amirbkhan that's okay, there’s plenty of other documented malfeasance, like uber, that will gradually reduce a driver's fee depending on frequency, to encourage less frequent drivers to drive more often and then leaves them chasing the big payday it withholds from them, their take rate algorithm that has drivers making lower percentages of the larger fares, or the ‘uber but for nurses’ app that buys credit data and uses it to lowball healthcare workers under greater financial pressure, because they are less able to turn down work.

the reason stories like this are believable is because these types of things are absolutely things that platforms actually do.

MacBalance Jan 6

@amirbkhan I applaud your uncommon willingness to acknowledge you were wrong and try to fix potential misinformation.

Amir Khan Jan 6

@MacBalance oh thanks for letting me know. 🙏🏽

FeloniousPunk Jan 6

@amirbkhan THANK YOU for editing the original post to let other know. This is the way.

Amir Khan Jan 6

@FeloniousPunk your welcome!And I should know better not to get swayed by Reddit content floating in the Fediverse 🙄