artnoiDec 22, 2025
I’m at a company whose primary product food delivery app where drivers are gig workers.
I’ve been here for 2 years now, and what I see here cements in me with what other people have been saying out about such companies and their services.
Recently, an ex-exec was denied entry into a Thai left-leaning (center-left?) political party, and I engaged with some people online who asked me why I hold such strong feelings against the exec, hence this post.
Since Thai libel and defamation cases are really aggressive (and without truth as defense), let’s make this post more generalized and about American global platforms which are already criticized and scrutinized by many people instead.
Note: this is only about the services (and their owners/execs/MBAs/BBAs), not the many people working there who just follow orders like the poor programmer that I am.
Gig platforms are those that provide arena for gig economy activity, such as taxi services and food delivery, where the customer can order on the platform’s app, and driver provides his own vehicle, fuel, and labor to drive the customer around. The customer pays the app, who then pays the driver after deducting the app’s “fees”.
They are middlemen providing “marketplace” for certain services. Their main function is to coordinate stuff with computers to make the orders happen, but they don’t do much else other than charging the customer more for it.
Like most middlemen, they should be despised. But apparently, they aren’t, and shallow customers seem to love them and see nothing wrong with all of this. This helped them expand, to the point of “disrupting” the traditional business model.
Now, how did they expand? It’s called blitzscaling.
If you’d read about actual gig platform businesses like Uber, DoorDash, AirBnB, etc, and their questionable blitzscaling strategies (which is usually initially illegal or exists in the grey area), you probably came across this term.
Blitzscaling is required for these middleman platforms to expand, otherwise they won’t, because people generally hate middlemen. So blitzscaling gotta be very aggressive and break some the “meta” of the current gameplay, in order for it to succeed.
All of these platforms (including e-commerce apps) follow the same shitty and evil principles of blitzscaling. We can reduce the essence of blitzscaling into 2 core features:
pioneering with illegal activities
very cheap services initially (illegally cheap)
These 2 core ideas go hand in hand. They feed each other.
First aspect of blitzscaling is illegal activities. These blitzscaling platforms all started with illegal businesses.
AirBnB and Uber started out illegal in all markets they operated in. But they kept doing it, until it became legal by lobbying. This is true everywhere you look: US, UK, Europe, Singapore, China, Thailand.
It does this by first “pioneering” innovations by breaking the law (and thus acquiring the first mover advantages), and make the service prices very cheap by undercuting prices with illegal operations (i.e. not paying minimum wages, not providing insurance, or other monopolistic practices).
Even today, these businesses still operate illegally or in the grey area of law. For example, AirBnB is still banned in NYC, LA, and SF, but of course you’ll still find one in these cities.
Because they aren’t regulated like real taxi companies or existing businesses, most of the victims (e.g. of arbitary pricings) had no recourse to the law, and the platforms are free to experiment and get away with their next-gen high-tech evil shit unpunished, such as surge pricing and dynamic pricing, or AirBnB’s infamous cleaning fees.
And also thanks to the platform’s deep financial backing, they can run their illegal businesses at huge losses for some time, before paying up their fines and lobbying for their businesses to be legal.
Isn’t that cool? When other people do it, they call them frauds. When the tech bros do it they call it progress.
Next, after setting up the illegal business, these platforms must now compete with well established players who play by the rules.
But even then, the platforms can’t actually compete fairly initially because they’re new to the market, so they undercut their prices artificially instead. Now suddenly there’s an influx of customers. Talk about dirty ass play.
As they got huge sum of investment from investors, they could use that money to undercut their own prices to drive the competition out, even if it means they’re themselves taking losses.
Thanks to their deep pocket, they can take on billion dollars of losses head on before they flinch, or ask investors for more. Meanwhile, the smaller competitors are faced with existential crisis.
It’s war of attrition, like Russia and Ukraine. The scale and reach of these platforms mean that they’ll surely win with time and no regulation.
With prolonged price undercuts, three things happen:
Competition dies or capitulates
Taxi drivers and PizzaHut are joining these platforms. They initially fought bitterly to no avail.
In the case of Thailand and other corruptible countries, regulators also capitulate.
In Thailand, platforms grew so much that Grab was allowed their own designated “pick up spots” at Thai airports despite the existing airport taxi cartel/mafia vehemently opposing it.
The Thai government also keeps postponing the enforcement of vehicle registration laws that prohibits personal vehicles from being used with these platforms. It’s been almost a decade since these platforms first came here, yet, this has not been enforced.
No changes about labor law tweaks were made, let alone seriously discussed about.
Customers become accustomed to or hooked to the services (i.e. became lazy)
These apps modified their customer behaviorally. It’s surprisingly amazing how the human mind is easily addicted to new, lazier lifestyles.
Now, food and grocery comes from phone, not streets, or restaurants, or shops, or pickups, or drive-thrus. Going out for food now is a hassle, despite it being normal for all humans for the past thousands of year, up until very recently.
Market becomes mono/duopoly
This is the final nail in the coffin. Once other competitor/smaller platforms die, power is centralized in one or very few hands. This gives unprecendented power for these apps over drivers and restaurants.
If you coupled this with ongoing economic issues facing the working class, it seems we got ourselves a new class of overlords: the tech bro overlords.
When these 3 things happen, the platform got unprecedented unchecked leverage against all stakeholders, including the government. Now that the time is ripe to finally focus on profitability, they slowly introduce enshittification.
Enshittification is when products become shittier and more expensive with time.
Examples are different with each platform’s business, but it generally increases the overall prices and is usually accompanied by worsening conditions of features.
It’s easy to spot one because you will hate it every single time it happens to you.
Examples for Netflix include:
Ads
Netflix’s old mantra is it’s ad-free. Now, the cheapest tier forces you to watch ads.
Actively banning sharing passwords
Netflix’s another old mantra is that you can somewhat shares it with friend, as long as it’s not commercially or excessive.
Now they invested millions to crack it down, leading to false positives and what not.
Worse video quality
We used to be able to select FHD with standard pricing. Now you gotta pay premium to get what you used to get the same resolution in 2010s when computers were ten times slower than now.
Examples for delivery apps include:
“Express order” fees
Most delivery apps start with 1 delivery fee tier. Later on, they’d add “express” tier that they claim will make your food arrive faster. Bad news is it doesn’t.
Now you’re paying more just to get your warm food.
Back-to-back delivery (multiple-order delivery where individual order time is increased)
Instead of distributing orders as they come in, platforms are not priotizing delivery cost per order, and so are now “optimizing” for cost rather than wait time, leading to cold pizzas.
Drivers are “forced” to accept these multiple orders, otherwise their stats deteriorate and they get paid even less.
Because customers are not aware of this back-of-the-house features, they blame the slow deliveries on drivers, tipping them less, or worse, rating them very low despite it being the platform’s faults.
The apps are also keen to use this opportunity to assign less fees to the drivers for these hooked orders. The platform get the same revenues, get to pay the driver less, and the customers blame the drivers for delays.
Win-win situation, everyone.
Dynamic pricing for both customers and drivers
Easy paying customers get charged more, because the platforms know you pay without comparing prices. While frugal customers get personalized discounts to facilitate the trades.
Well behaving drivers get paid less because the platforms know they’ll accept the orders anyway. Difficult drivers get paid more to incentivize them to accept more orders.
Customer support kept getting worse
We were able to get cash refunds. Now it’s credit refunds. We had call center, but now they replaced it with chatbots. For most people, you won’t get human on the line unless you can prove that the situation is really grim, like maybe thefts.
When people talk about enshittification, they usually talk from a customer perspective. But enshittification encompasses much more than that, especially in platform products with multiple stakeholders like the gig work platforms.
In the case of food delivery, there’re 3 stakeholders: the restaurants, the drivers, and the customers. Enshittification affects all 3, but it’s their execution on drivers that’s most concerning and evil because it’s outright worker exploitation.
Worst is how they always mistreat their riders, you know, the ones who actually do the work and provide values for the platforms. They can have the most polished apps on Earth and the best price, but it won’t mean shit if there’re no drivers waiting around.
These apps are delivery apps, but they don’t actually deliver. They just provide the software and platform to do so, which is not in the physical world and by itself won’t cook or move the food.
The equipment and labor required to cook and move the food is provided by the restaurant or the rider himself. The app just sits there and eats its “fair share” of profits, running on rider’s own phone as he rides his own bike. We can compare the apps to landlords, ie the rentiers of rentier capitalism.
And because the drivers are not employees but gig workers, coupled with the legal grey area that these apps exist in, there are no “standard fees” or “fee calculation” as defined by law, and they can artificially depress and inflate delivery fees and undercut their own prices even further.
The Thai food delivery duopoly lowers the base rider fees every year. In the last 3-4 years, I have not yet seen a single year where they raised the base fees. Yes, you read that right. In fact, the base fees go down every year. You can go in the Thai rider facebook groups and confirm that with the workers’ complaints every February.
They also have this weird incentive system that actually pushes the riders to their limits, otherwise the system won’t assign orders to the riders. The system tracks driver performance quite invasively.
Most riders feel like they could easily lose favor with the platforms if they reject some orders, and are afraid to lose their income so much so that they accepted unfavorable orders just to “please the AI”.
This means that you, the gig worker, gotta be super obedient to these platforms and must accept x% of orders to qualify to work there, or 90% to qualify for their incentives, without which your income is below poverty line.
That’s more strict than regular employer-employee dynamics. It creates a feeling where you are watched all the time by all-powerful malevolent overlord. It’s psychological warfare and torture like how Amazon treats their warehouse workers.
And as our global economy tanks and will continue to tank, more and more workers are entering gig economy.
Some poor dudes I know personally wait patiently for months to register as riders.
The platforms can now treat current riders even more poorly because they have a very large number of people waiting to become new riders in the registration pipeline. You can see how this only strengthens the power imbalance and abuse.
When drivers are this easily replaceable, the chance of these evil greedy platforms capitulating is virtually zero. This is why driver wages never rose. Never rise. And never will.
Fuck these apps. Fuck the owners. Fuck the BBAs and MBAs who come originally up with such shallow and evil ploy to exploit fellow human beings, and the stupid greedy fucks who copied the original ideas and walking the stage like they’re genius.
The owner of some Thai app literally said the inspiration to jump into food delivery is “to get rich lol”. They aren’t your friends. They never intend to be. They are here to exploit and steal, and then go on forums to talk about how innovative or disruptive their businesses are when in fact anyone brave enough to break the law with a connection to VCs could pull this off.
This is why even a Thai bank, SCB, could also launch their food delivery service. The business is easy if you have cash (or could sweet talk the investors) and are willing to break the laws and lobby later. SCB delivery app only died because they, a publicly owned bank, were not willing to break the laws enough to be competitive against the dominant players.
Uber also couldn’t compete with domestic apps, because they couldn’t network (i.e. lobby) with the Thai establishment well enough to allow it. All this is to say our domestic players are even worse than the Americans. No one exploit Thais like a Thai, as the old saying goes.
Fuck, I mean, if the business model is to pay criminally low delivery fees and keep pushing costs down, while ignoring all regulations, I bet anyone could do it if they have enough cash and friends. Even the food review website company could do it.
These apps benefit no one but the owners. They can only survive thanks to the abundance of desperate gig workers, who were driven here from traditional employment thanks to wage stagnation. The system failed them, and the platforms exploited them.
These apps destroy more opportunities than they create, and are happily selling themselves as benevolent job makers. All of them have this noble company goals: make some where a better place, make living better, blah blah. I for one never once heard this goal being discussed when implementing new features.
I bet the CEOs (whose faces are public) never had the courage to face the riders personally, that they never let the riders know where they live, or even that they might never use their own app to order for their home. The coward owners of these platforms will fear their own workers, like Bezos fears his warehouse workers and Elon fearing his Tesla workers.
I also bet the platforms will quickly replace human drivers with self-driving cars, bikes, or drones once that become “feasible” (not even legal).
The world has become a grim place for human workers, and these platforms are the epitome of the problems. I wish more and more people will talk about this.
Thank you.
The keywords you can look up later are: “blitzscaling”, “enshitification”, “wage vs productivity”, “rentier economy”, “gig economy”, “reaganomics”, “technofeudalism”.
I’ve also compiled some YouTube videos about the our topic:
2020: Uber is evil
2025: Uber monopoly in UK
Hope this helps.