Post #1537662
2026-01-02 15:47 UTC
Replies (24)
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@amirbkhan@mastodon.social 2026-01-02 17:02
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/
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@webhat@infosec.exchange 2026-01-02 16:19
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social icymi @pluralistic@mamot.fr
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@wowo@chirpless.com 2026-01-02 17:06
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social thats crazy
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@EndicottAuthor@mastodon.social 2026-01-02 17:23
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social And the worst part is that the whistleblower fears for his life and that of his family.
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@november@veganism.social 2026-01-02 17:30
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social gig workers have been saying this for years but NOW people listen
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@kbsez@mstdn.social 2026-01-02 17:36
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social So what service is he talking about?
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@bygone12@mastodon.social 2026-01-02 18:23
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social 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. 😊
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@octows@mastodon.social 2026-01-02 19:10
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr The principal problem with modern capitalism is that there's more work to do than a single Luigi Mangione can handle.
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@SuperSpaceFan@mastodon.art 2026-01-02 19:35
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social I'd like to know which service this is so I can avoid it like my life depended on it. @blogdiva@mastodon.social
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@lucyruthe@mastodon.social 2026-01-02 21:09
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social 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....
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@thegarbagebird@theblower.au 2026-01-02 22:25
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social ah, more of the behaviour that is incentivised by what i am told is the best system in the world.
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@JaneraTiciano@mstdn.animexx.de 2026-01-02 23:41
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social 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.
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@Moah@mastodon.gamedev.place 2026-01-03 00:38
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social 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.
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@pekan@sym.erable.dev 2026-01-03 01:05
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social 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 :/
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@Alexjusino@mastodon.social 2026-01-03 01:19
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social 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.
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@coastGNU@federation.network 2026-01-03 08:35
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social @coastgnu@norden.social 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.
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@BigHeadMode@social.linux.pizza 2026-01-05 02:17
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social This story is fake, can you delete it? https://www.hardresetmedia.com/p/an-ai-generated-reddit-post-fooled
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@inthehands@hachyderm.io 2026-01-06 02:34
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social 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.
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@bobkmertz@techhub.social 2026-01-06 03:58
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social 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
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@funcrunch@me.dm 2026-01-06 04:53
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social @caseynewton@mastodon.social has debunked this as a hoax: https://www.platformer.news/fake-uber-eats-whisleblower-hoax-debunked/
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@kevinrns@mstdn.social 2026-01-06 06:17
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social Hooray all the way. Mastodon editing and reposting is brill.
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@thegarbagebird@theblower.au 2026-01-06 07:24
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social 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.
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@MacBalance@mstdn.games 2026-01-06 16:26
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social I applaud your uncommon willingness to acknowledge you were wrong and try to fix potential misinformation.
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@FeloniousPunk@beige.party 2026-01-06 17:00
@amirbkhan@mastodon.social THANK YOU for editing the original post to let other know. This is the way.