Flutterby™! : Extractive business models

Extractive business models

2026-01-02 17:34:12.315307+01 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

Reddit /r/confession: 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.

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.

Via this Toot, which captured the post in images.

[ related topics: Interactive Drama Food Work, productivity and environment ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2026-01-03 01:21:44.620835+01 by: markd

The rare times I do food delivery (when traveling), I tip in cash upon delivery. No trust for the companies involved.

Add your own comment:

Format with:

(You should probably use "Text" mode: URLs will be mostly recognized and linked, _underscore quoted_ text is looked up in a glossary, _underscore quoted_ (http://xyz.pdq) becomes a link, without the link in the parenthesis it becomes a <cite> tag. All <cite>ed text will point to the Flutterby knowledge base. Two enters (ie: a blank line) gets you a new paragraph, special treatment for paragraphs that are manually indented or start with "#" (as in "#include" or "#!/usr/bin/perl"), "/* " or ">" (as in a quoted message) or look like lists, or within a paragraph you can use a number of HTML tags:

p, img, br, hr, a, sub, sup, tt, i, b, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, cite, em, strong, code, samp, kbd, pre, blockquote, address, ol, dl, ul, dt, dd, li, dir, menu, table, tr, td, th

Comment policy

We will not edit your comments. However, we may delete your comments, or cause them to be hidden behind another link, if we feel they detract from the conversation. Commercial plugs are fine, if they are relevant to the conversation, and if you don't try to pretend to be a consumer. Annoying endorsements will be deleted if you're lucky, if you're not a whole bunch of people smarter and more articulate than you will ridicule you, and we will leave such ridicule in place.

Flutterby™ is a trademark claimed by

Dan Lyke

for the web publications at www.flutterby.com and www.flutterby.net.