I.
AI tools often make my job easier. Today, though, I want to talk about a way that they’re making it harder.
Over the weekend, like thousands of other people browsing Reddit, I stumbled on a post that alleged significant fraud at an unnamed food delivery app. The post, written by a fresh account named Trowaway_whistleblow, purported to be from a software engineer preparing to leave the company. It detailed various ways that the company rigged the platform against customers and delivery drivers: slowing down standard deliveries to make priority orders look artificially faster, for example, and charging a “regulatory response fee” that the company uses to lobby against driver unions.
Perhaps the most jarring accusation in the post, which the whistleblower cited as his main reason for quitting, was that the platform calculates a “desperation score” for its drivers based on when and how often they accept deliveries. The whistleblower wrote:
“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.”
The post seemed to confirm our worst fears about the platforms we rely...
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