Believability aside (I do think it’s believable personally) this is pretty much how “evil” (from outsider perspective) is done at every company, including mine. Inside it’s all sprint meetings, KPIs and terminology that are either intentionally or unintentionally designed to keep engineers far from thinking about impact on real people. It’s easy to convince a 25 year old whiz kid to optimize human assets, it’s just like Factorio and it feels good to see the number go up. In-jokes and dark humor fly and it all feels not real and just like a game. Sometimes on purpose by management, sometimes automatic as a coping mechanism. Defense (my field) is very much the same way.

> I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.

Why bother using library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop if he doesn't care anymore? Why give out the biggest clue, which is the time of his resignation letter? If the story is real, this company is a straight-up scammer waiting for the biggest headline and lawsuit of the year.

> 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

This in particular sounds very fake to me.

If they are delaying the regular orders, then they are either a) having drivers sit idle or b) freeing up resources for the priority orders.

In the (b) case this would just deliver the promised prioritization behavior, not evil and not what OP is claiming.

In the (a) case where they are actually having drivers sit idle, then they are reducing the throughput of their system significantly. Which might be fine for a quick A/B test on a subset of customers, but as framed this is basically a psy op to trick customers en masse into thinking the priority order is faster when it really isn’t. To have that effect, you would need to deploy this to all customers long enough for them to organically switch back and forth between priority and regular enough times to notice the difference. That seems like it couldn’t possibly be better than the much simpler option of just implementing the priority behavior and reducing its effect down to zero slowly over time (which would be evil but isn’t the claim).

Lyft is also a scam for the drivers. In a ride from the airport to home during rush hour (1h and 15 minutes drive) I got charged ~$140. The company was paying, so whatever.

During the ride I was chatting with the driver, and I was curious how much he was making from the ride.

At the end of the ride he showed me. $48 (before my tip). WTF.

From that he had to pay gas, maintenance and taxes.

How is this legal? What is the marginal cost for Lyft per mile driven? It must be close to zero. Insane.

If true (I'm not sure), this is kind of economics in action. There's a monopolistic market maker, screwing every last cent out of providers, with enormous power imbalances. The market maker is semi monopolistic, the labour is low-skilled, with little bargaining power and few better options. The "winners" are shareholders of the company and to some extent the end customers (who, other things being equal, would have to pay more for the labour).

In other words, I see this not a special greed of this particular company, but a logical conclusion of the economic system it operates in.

(I'm not saying it is good either. Only that raging against the symptom is a bit misplaced, and instead you should focus attention at the causes).

Without evidence this is just fiction, I don’t trust some random Reddit post.

Big if true. But actually maybe not that big since people suspect it anyway. This is the "innovation" that defenders of the "free market" are always touting.

How to be sure? Transparency requirements. I think we need way more transparency requirements. All sorts of financial and operational data should be publicly available.

I do use some of these regularly when I'm in a pinch but I would never even think to tip in the app itself. If I don't trust a company to pay the drivers a wage, why would I trust them to give them my tip!

Edit : I always tip with cash on delivery.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260102060534/https://old.reddi...

Edit: switched to archive of old.reddit.com

There's very good restaurant in my neighbourhood that I order from regularly. I tried ordering directly from them after hearing about how nasty the delivery app company was. I thought they would appreciate it: they wouldn't have to pay the intermediary. But it turns out they prioritise the app and my orders took longer to arrive.

So I'm back on the app...

Trying to find any hints of this elsewhere online as I’m inherently skeptical of posts such as this. This is what I have found, take it for what it is. Sorry for any formatting or spelling. It’s 1:15am and I’m scrolling HN rather than sleeping.

I don’t know why but I always just assumed priority delivery meant “faster”. It doesn’t.

> If you select the Priority Delivery option, a Priority Fee will be added on top of the delivery fee for your order to be dropped off first in case of a batched delivery.

So, I’m guessing, if you are in a batched delivery of priority orders you are paying for normal service. [0][1]

Looking at the DoorDash blog, they are constantly running experiments so none of this really shocks me.

> At the time of writing, we run about one thousand experiments per year, including 30 concurrently running switchback experiments, which make up to 200,000 QPS of bucket evaluations. [2]

Regarding the desperation score: algorithmic wage discrimination appears very well studied and verified. [3][4]

The delivery fees to pay for lobbying efforts is very well covered apparently.

> In an earnings call last month, DoorDash executives told investors that the number of commission caps more than doubled from August, when there were 32, to December, when there were 73. Still more have been added since then. Localities that imposed caps are small cities like Pacific Grove, California, and larger cities like Oakland; some are entire states, like Oregon and Washington. Prabir Adarkar, the company's chief financial officer, said the company made $36 million less in revenue during the last three months of 2020 because of the new limits.

> DoorDash executives have argued that they have no financial choice but to fight back by adding fees in jurisdictions where there are caps.

> In Oakland, according to the city's online lobbyist database, DoorDash now has a dedicated representative registered with the city for the first time. Other lobbyists for DoorDash are handling efforts for multiple cities. On March 15, Chad Horrell, a lobbyist for DoorDash, left nearly identical public comment voicemails for the city councils in Akron, Ohio, and Huntington Beach, California. [5]

> Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and other gig companies who authored and advertised Proposition 22 spent a record $200 million on the ballot initiative to persuade Californians to vote it into law. In the weeks leading up to the 2020 general election, Uber and Lyft bombarded its riders and drivers with endless messaging through its apps and by saturating the television and digital ad space. [6]

The section on companies subsidizing pay looks to have been proven in court multiple times and led to millions in settlements.

> On Feb. 24, New York Attorney General Letitia James said in a press release that between May 2017 and September 2019, an Office of the Attorney General (OAG) investigation found that the delivery platform “used customer tips to offset the base pay it had already guaranteed to workers, instead of giving workers the full tips they rightfully earned.”

> Attorney General Karl A. Racine today announced a $2.54 million settlement with Instacart, an online delivery company, resolving a lawsuit alleging that the company misled DC consumers, used tips left for workers to boost the company’s bottom line, and failed to pay required sales taxes. [8]

[0] https://help.uber.com/ubereats/restaurants/article/how-the-d...

[1] https://www.uberpeople.net/threads/angry-uber-eats-customers...

[2] https://careersatdoordash.com/blog/the-4-principles-doordash...

[3] https://www.columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wag...

[4] https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/05/12/the-gig-trap/algorithm...

[5] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1262088

[7] https://www.today.com/food/news/doordash-settlement-payout-r...

[8] https://oag.dc.gov/release/ag-racine-announces-instacart-mus...

A sprint planning meeting seems like the wrong place to put that topic.

I'm also not used to developers having that much visibility into accounting practices. And that seems like an odd way to structure things.

I wonder how many people at this company put in their quiting notice yesterday. His wish might be granted.

> I’m posting this from a library Wi-Fi on a burner laptop because I am technically under a massive NDA. I don’t care anymore. I put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.

I thought I would share this just because I found it interesting:

https://www.pangram.com/history/a22e7372-5970-4537-b511-0416...

Pangram is an interesting company and, to me, seems to be SOTA in AI detection. This came back as “Fully AI Generated.”

It has been interesting to read about the methodology. Still not sure how I feel about it!

Either way, as other comments have suggested, important to take things with a grain of salt as always.

I can believe in each fact individually, but altogether (and that the author has exposure to all of that) it feels like just a rage bait.

Here are red flags for me:

1. Priority delivery. Thanks to zepbound I order delivery much less, but when I did (doordash/uber eats/grubhub) the priority delivery proposition was not about dispatch but about routing: driver going straight to your house, without any intermediate stops and deliveries to other people. So dispatch logic must be at least somewhat different. Also from engineering/product perspective the delay between priority and standard could be justified. To give rough analogy: FedEx can deliever package that I drop at 5pm to other side of the country at 9am, if I pay a lot of premium. It doesn’t mean that they can deliver all the packages with that speed and they deliberately slow down all other mail.

2. The emotionally manipulative things like “pay the rent”, “tip theft”

3. With all the modern corporate doublespeak trainings, there is 0 chance that something would be called “desperation score” in us business.

4. The benefit fee that goes into some “policy defense” - that I can believe in, actually. But again, emotionally manipulative add on (unions, your delivery guy homeless)

5. Again, Instacart, for example, says that 100% of tip goes to driver. If it’s not, they just painting crazy big target on their backs. So the scheme, as described, while quite evil, and not impossible to implement, looks also out of place with apps that I have used.

To summarize and repeat my point - I could believe some of the things individually, but that one guy has exposure to all of that, I doubt it.

Greed. There are many ways to do good business, but we constantly push for exploitation. Technology will be blamed as always, not the operators. Humans such a disappointment.

More evidence for my theory that the only reason Uber et al are able to exist is because they have an infinite supply of suckers signing up as drivers. Any McJob pays better now.

https://old.reddit.com/r/confession/comments/1q1mzej/im_a_de...

If anyone wants up save that thread's content and metadata before OP nukes it.

These delivery apps are shady, maybe even outright fraudulent.

I had my credit card on one of Delivery Hero's apps. Everything looked fine until I went through my credit card statement, I had up to 5 $10 to $15 payments made to delivery hero which were refunded almost instantly. Those charges weren't associated with a single order on the app, no emails, nothing.

I assumed they were talking advantage of customers with credit cards on file to line their books. I removed my credit card from their apps, never going to save it in app for faster checkout.

Obviously the OP has no hard evidence but I wouldn't be surprised if it was all true. I'm sure every major company dreams of dynamically gouging their workers and users like this.

Another food delivery app anecdote: they will always blame the restaurant for their lack of driver supply. I've had orders stuck on "preparing your food" for an hour but when I called the restaurant they said it's been ready for 40 mins and they're waiting for someone to come pick it up.

Lots of people are sceptical of the reddit post. Yes sure the post can be fake but if you consider any gig economy business what incentives would they have for not doing this?

Exactly. Not screwing everyone over is seeing as leaving money on the table.

true. ex-SWE at major food delivery app here. those places are very, very, very toxic.

With Deliveroo, I already caught the app lying. One time the order was stuck at "waiting for the restaurant/cooking" for a very unusual time, like 40 mins instead of the usual 10 mins.

So I called the restaurant and they told me that the order was ready for like 25 mins but the driver didn't pick it up yet.

When I called the custom service after that, they told me that the driver was finishing another delivery and will pick it up soon.

But so the drive was trying to pin the delay on restaurant when it was their fault and that in the end you will get cold food.

For context, this was removed from 4 other subreddits.

https://www.reddit.com/user/Trowaway_whistleblow/submitted/

So are we talking Uber eats here?

I can make the same post about one of the top apps on the App store. I was burning with such rage I never did. I supposed I felt in the end itd get no attention at all

LLM writing style. Including obvious em-dashes.

So we're reposting fake reddit engagement bait posts here now? Come on, this is barely credible. Even if it seemed credible, this is not how you whistleblow effectively.

To be clear I'm not trying to defend these companies, they suck and getting fast food delivered at home is stupid. But the way the post is clearly written by someone with surface level technical knowledge, passed through a LLM. And the provide absolutely no evidence.

And so another myth was born, thanks to an anonymous fiction writer from Reddit!

People still believe that "Uber raises prices when your battery is low!", and now they'll be parroting this for years to come. Great job.

Putting aside whether this person is just lying, the actual claim doesn't seem possible if you think about it for more than a few seconds.

The claim is that the benefits fee does not go to the driver, but that is not possible in the only interpretation of the claim that matters. When the law in California was passed that caused these fees to be added. Drivers immediately started receiving benefits required by the legislation. Those benefits are paid by the delivery company. At the same time, the company added this fee. So the only question is, how much fee money is collected relative to the cost of the benefits?

From a very coarse BOTEC, it seems that the fees are probably not enough to cover the cost (for doordash), so in fact the fees do go "100%" to the drivers, in the sense that more than the amount collected by the fee is spent on the legally required benefits the the fee is based on

"Human assets" is a bad euphemism, but one company I know of used the term "NPCs".

Most of OP's claims can be supported or refuted by randomized trials.

For example:

> 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.

Find lots of drivers. Ask some to log on at 10 PM and accept garbage orders, others to log on at 3 PM and accept garbage orders, others to log on at 3PM and only accept high-paying orders, etc. See what kind of orders they receive after a while.

The drivers you select are biased towards enrolling in trials, but I doubt that's significant. Even if so, the algorithm showing certain drivers different orders, who don't clearly perform "worse" in a way the study could observe, already seems wrong.

EDIT:

> 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.

This is much easier. A single driver can provide strong evidence to support or refute this by showing the base pay and tip for their recent orders (AFAIK all apps show drivers these metrics). Unless someone (even a single person) has done this (on one of the delivery subreddits), there's strong evidence that OP is lying.

If the allegations are true, then I think the writer needs to call up a good state Attorney General's office, and ask who to talk to.

Though I'd guess that the alleged scummy company has seen this, and is already preparing their response, trying to purge any incriminating emails and PowerPoints, etc.

I am surprised engineers have not been leaking information like this more. Like waaay waaay more. Especially youtube, due to its reach and history of adpocalypse 1.0, 2.0 and others. Google as whole and the big daddy - Facebook, who has been proven to run psychological experiments on selected samples of population and scamming advertisers. I do not buy that NDA bullshit. That has nothing to do with ethics. I am frankly quite disappointed in people working in IT nowadays that they just keep on grinding with these manipulative and exploitative companies and their policies and agendas. I actually have way more respect for an engineer whom is writing code for ballistic missiles than people working in these big tech companies. Sure, the salary is nice, but how much does it take to sell your soul? I am not being spiritual or religious here but rather looking at it from one own's psyche point of view and long term health effects of doing work like this, despite the big bucks at the end of the month.

> put in my two weeks yesterday and honestly, I hope they sue me.

I smell some bullshit.

If this would come out for Bolt that my tip won't reach 100% to driver/delivery guy, I would quit using it. Lying to users about especially when they want to be generous is like fake beggars.

Isn't artificially delaying "normal" orders same thing as speeding up priority ones? I mean, it means executing priority ones out of queue.

Unless they just force the deliverymen sit and do nothing for extra 5-10 minutes, which would be a waste of time and money for the company way above $2.99 so i don't think they do that.

I mean, regardless of whether or not this is true, the death of the consumer surplus is upon us. When that goes, the entire point of efficient markets goes with it.

Library wifi and burner laptop?

1. Any serious IT person knows you don't need burner laptop with VM

2. Doxxed himself to said company in the same paragraph, nice.

Fan fiction or really bad opsec.

Also, anyone who drives for any food app in any country, knows it sucks.

Why are we always blaming the lowest developer for things? How about we target the Jira overlords who know exactly what they are doing?

I was once in a team developing a billing system that was counting how many times NSA invokated APIS to snoop on ATnT subscribers. The whole thing was very decoupled and dynamicly set up it took us developer very long time to figure out what this is used for. But the PM knew exactly what they did from the start.

Stop buying the overpriced slop. My hunger disappears when I see the prices for just a pizza.

Another reason cash is important. Don‘t give up on it!

Stuff like this has been alleged by drivers for years... It really wouldn't surprise me.

In case the reddit post gets deleted, here's the text:

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. I 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.

The worst bit was when, at my major food app, we had a “cancer patient” score where we would just not deliver food to sufficiently terminal patients because we knew that they would be dead before the appeal process completed and we could reject and ask for arbitration. We’d win almost everything.

But that’s just a story I made up for points on the Internet.

Another evil thing about the whole food delivery industry is that infantilises people to the point they are incapable of making their own food.

The most interesting thing to me are the "company apologists" comments below this article.

The biggest and scariest achievement of this enshittified internet is how divided people are, and how ready they are calling bullshit on very plausible claims.

I think the tech fields where companies rely on billions of tiny transactions are more susceptible to this kind of shadiness, but even in B2B saas we (grunt level engineers) were often asked to implement enshittification to either increase customer retention (EG: lets not give the users the API to exfiltrate their data and go to the competition, anyone?) or revenue or some other shit.

Do (some of) you really think companies would NOT do this, unless its not only illegal but also strictly enforced? I wish I were living in the same optimistic world as you guys.

Blockchain and split payments would work here. The transparency would be useful. Maybe even using x402?

So buyers should be able to see where and how their money is going to be distributed after payment. How much does the driver get? How much is he/she earning? Comparable drivers can compare metrics.

Perhaps unions could build some type of payment app and have gig workers use it as part of their employment contract?

So gig workers end up like ebay sellers with a feedback, followers and sales data on display. They can take their profile with them to new employers as well. Buyers get a profile too. Funds could also be held in escrow, and refunds granted where applicable. I don't know.

This is believable. I have a personal anecdote regarding "Priority Delivery". This was about 2 years ago. After watching the driver go to another business and house before me, I messaged support and they refunded this priority delivery fee. The driving tip and base pay accusation can be easily verified by testing tip amounts and asking drivers what they are awarded.

Mostly believable. Even though I have never seen anything like it, I have worked with managers and product owners who have voiced a desire to do similar things. It is also clear that companies today (including the one I work at) often incentivise the dilution of responsibility so that nobody is cleanly attributable as the person who caused the system to be not just amoral, but actively detrimental to customers and other users in the long term.