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.
I figured this out in the first few months. Any other driver I tried explaining this to called me crazy and/or a cheater. I made twice what they did in a third of the drive-time, maybe half the time in my car when you count the time I sat Available while playing on my phone, using indoor bathrooms like a human-being, napping/meditating, or stuffing my face.
Sure buddy, I’m just that jealous of your work-ethic and two-door hatch-back that’s probably seen you reported dozens-of-times over. Super-hacker, liar, lazy fuck; Ya got me dead to rights.
Edit: I only drove passengers for the ride-share companies. Washing my hands enough for anything food related on an on-going basis destroys my skin, and my car is nicely climate-controlled, so …
the best part is, some of us drivers have largely already figured out they do this and have to pay for a second app, Maxymo, to automatically do math and see if a ride is worth a certain $/hr, and accept/decline based on this.
Every now and then, Lyft will try to goad me into accepting offers that would pay, over time, about half as much as what I normally get (Uber, unsurprisingly, always offers me less, so I don’t drive for them), and I can’t focus on driving and do mental math at the same time. This wouldn’t be necessary if they just paid fixed rates based on distance and demand, or gave drivers control over what they want to charge for a ride like an actual contractor, but that doesn’t make shareholders happy.
I figured this out in the first few months. Any other driver I tried explaining this to called me crazy and/or a cheater. I made twice what they did in a third of the drive-time, maybe half the time in my car when you count the time I sat Available while playing on my phone, using indoor bathrooms like a human-being, napping/meditating, or stuffing my face.
Sure buddy, I’m just that jealous of your work-ethic and two-door hatch-back that’s probably seen you reported dozens-of-times over. Super-hacker, liar, lazy fuck; Ya got me dead to rights.
Edit: I only drove passengers for the ride-share companies. Washing my hands enough for anything food related on an on-going basis destroys my skin, and my car is nicely climate-controlled, so …
the best part is, some of us drivers have largely already figured out they do this and have to pay for a second app, Maxymo, to automatically do math and see if a ride is worth a certain $/hr, and accept/decline based on this.
Every now and then, Lyft will try to goad me into accepting offers that would pay, over time, about half as much as what I normally get (Uber, unsurprisingly, always offers me less, so I don’t drive for them), and I can’t focus on driving and do mental math at the same time. This wouldn’t be necessary if they just paid fixed rates based on distance and demand, or gave drivers control over what they want to charge for a ride like an actual contractor, but that doesn’t make shareholders happy.