About that viral Reddit delivery app post…
“It’s not us!” — Uber and DoorDash
Late last week, an anonymous Reddit post purportedly outing a food delivery app for some pretty vile behavior went crazy viral. The poster, claiming to be a (drunk) engineer working at a major delivery app, accused the company of squeezing its couriers — dubbed “human assets” in internal lingo, the post said — for profits. The poster also accused the unnamed app of duping diners with bogus priority delivery fees and using tips paid by customers to cover a courier’s base pay.
The poster’s worst accusation in a list of bad accusations is that the unnamed delivery app uses a hidden metric to gauge its driver’s willingness to accept a low-priced delivery. This “desperation score,” according to the poster, “tracks how desperate they are for cash based on their acceptance behavior.”
“I can’t sleep at night knowing I helped build this machine,” they wrote.
Responses to the Reddit post were mixed; many thanked the OP (that’s internet speak for original poster) for blowing the whistle on a potentially exploitative practice, predicting a class-action lawsuit from contractors, customers, or both. Others labeled the post fake and AI-generated, composed by a disgruntled courier or internet troll.
Some of the loudest denials came from executives at two plausibly culpable companies: Uber and DoorDash. (There are only so many “major food delivery app” contenders, after all.)
“The viral post and horrible claims within it are not about DoorDash.”
On Saturday, DoorDash shared what I imagine must’ve been an emergency blog post systematically refuting each of the anonymous claims.
“To be clear,” the post reads, “the viral post and the horrible claims within it are not about DoorDash.”
Two of DoorDash’s co-founders, including CEO Tony Xu, posted similarly on X. Xu vowed to “fire anyone who promoted or tolerated the kind of culture described in this Reddit post.”
[These X embeds aren’t perfect so you’ll have to click through for the full text.]
Later, Uber chief operating officer Andrew Macdonald denied his company’s involvement, also on X. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi reshared Macdonald’s post.
(I couldn’t find any public response from number-three service Grubhub, whose CEO is not active on X, but I also didn’t ask.)
Is it real? Does it even matter, if we think it could be real?
I fielded a handful of, “Is this plausible?” texts from interested friends and contacts. My knee-jerk answer: Plausible, yes, but I don’t think the post is legit. (I do have a conspiracy theory that I’m not ready to share here, but I will if I can prove it.)
Based on the vigor with which app executives publicly denounced the post, they hope we don’t buy any of it. (“Don’t trust everything you read on the internet” from Uber’s Macdonald reads like a flippant eye-roll, doesn’t it?) But much of the internet seems willing to believe or at least entertain the ideas presented by this anonymous poster, sending the apps a troubling signal about consumer sentiment.
Delivery apps have long faced this kind of backlash. It usually comes in waves as it did during the early days of the pandemic almost six (!!) years ago. First, the dining public believed delivery apps might save restaurants during mandated shutdowns and periods of social distancing. Then, as restaurants started to publicly decry the hefty commissions these apps collected, some diners rebelled. This was the “delete your apps” era.
We did not delete our apps.
In fact, we’re more hooked now. Data from the National Restaurant Association suggests demand for restaurant delivery is growing. In a 2025 survey, most millennial and Gen Z adults called restaurant delivery an “essential” part of their lifestyle. These consumers also said they’re ordering delivery more than they did in the past. (Older cohorts, Gen Xers and baby boomers, did not respond with the same enthusiasm.) In the same survey, 88 percent of diners who live in urban areas said they’d order delivery more often if they had the money to pay for it.
This significant demand drives the apps to lower costs wherever possible, which is why last week’s post-holiday Reddit accusation — true or false — hit hard. It’s easy to believe that a large technology company is squeezing every dime it can from all of the humans that use its platform, especially after news of legal settlements and the platforms’ distaste for government minimum wage and tipping intervention… even if the viral claims are bogus. (And we all, from consumer to courier to CEO, seem to publicly agree that it would be Very Bad if they are not bogus.)
Could this post’s virality signal the next wave of consumer backlash against big delivery and the algorithms and scores and ratings and metrics it ascribes to human labor?
Maybe. But it might not matter for long. Remember: most of this drama goes away if, or when, human drivers are replaced by autonomous delivery robots — an eventual future that all of the major delivery apps are chasing.
