When I read the predictive tip based fee reduction I went, "yep thats what I would do if I was unscrupulous and worked there."

Some of this seems plausible—even expected—but other parts feel implausible. It's hard to believe that "Priority Delivery" does literally nothing. Optimizing payouts down to the lowest amount drivers will accept, on the other hand, is entirely believable. Also, given Uber's well-known microservice architecture, it seems unlikely that a random backend engineer would have deep insight across multiple independent systems, including money flows. My guess is that this was written by a real employee who took some liberties with the truth.

Yea, idk why this is even surprising. It's all sort of the obvious conclusion that these sorts of companies get to.

Facebook, dating apps, etc all do similar things with affinities and desperation to boost engagement.

The pearl clutching is just cope from people who haven't yet internalized that our industry encourages and glorifies deploying scummy practices at a huge scale.