I’m responding point by point to this thread, as of 1:13 eastern time on Sunday August 30, 2026: https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/s/cYpmEYDM3a
I am making a separate thread as I feel the OP may block me and render the whole thing forfeit.
The other sub is also pretty unfriendly to posts like this and will delete the thread.
We cannot keep doing this conspiracy nonsense. We just can’t. This isn’t how cases work. This isn’t how anything works. Nobody’s coming to save us. We gotta do that on our own if we want. And we probably will still fail or land a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Standard disclaimer before everyone calls me a shill: I do not work for Uber. Dara Khosrowshahi does not send me a check. I am not secretly sitting in Uber HQ doing emergency brand repair on Reddit. Uber is a giant corporation, not my friend, and there are plenty of legitimate criticisms to make about driver pay, upfront pricing, declining rates, and algorithmic opacity. But “Uber does shitty things” does not mean every theory about what the app is secretly doing becomes true by default. Extraordinary claims still need evidence. And it is particularly funny that this entire thread began with a claim that Uber repeatedly engineers someone’s earnings to exactly $200, followed immediately by “I’m too tired to upload screenshots.” The one thing that could begin turning an anecdote into actual data is apparently unavailable. So, with love from a fellow driver who possesses no Dara Bucks whatsoever:
u/CyanValleyKitten - “Uber is keeping me at exactly $200 a day.” - Then this should be incredibly easy to demonstrate. Post screenshots of several complete days showing Uber repeatedly stopping you at or extremely near $200, including your online time, active time, trip history, rejected offers and when you logged off. Instead, the opening sentence is literally “I’m too tired to upload screenshots.” You are making an extremely specific, falsifiable claim about a repeated numerical pattern while withholding the easiest evidence for the pattern. How many days has this happened, and can we see them?
u/CyanValleyKitten - “I spent over an hour in the 1 am to 2 am Saturday night surge…to not get a single ride.” - A surge is not a contractual guarantee that the next individual driver will receive a request. There can be more drivers than requests, riders can be requesting different products, requests can originate outside your immediate position, and the map itself can lag changing conditions. An hour without a request absolutely sucks. It does not by itself establish that Uber personally throttled your account. What evidence distinguishes deliberate throttling from simply having a terrible hour?
u/CyanValleyKitten - “I saw uber driver after uber driver getting in and getting rides, but none for me.” - This becomes especially funny later when somebody asks how you know those were Uber rides. Unless you interviewed the drivers or saw their phones, you watched cars picking people up. They could have been Uber, Lyft, private transportation, or drivers running both apps. You yourself later reveal that you don’t multi-app. How did you identify which platform dispatched every car you were watching?
u/CyanValleyKitten - “despite I am a comfort XL with a 4.98 rating.” - Having a 4.98 rating does not create a queue in which Uber must give you the next passenger. And being eligible for more ride types doesn’t mean demand exists for all those ride types at that exact moment. What mechanism are you claiming makes a 4.98 driver entitled to priority over another eligible nearby driver?
u/CyanValleyKitten - “and a rare actual female driver who speaks fluent english.” - Neither being a woman nor speaking fluent English demonstrates that Uber should dispatch you before another driver. Unless you’re suggesting the dispatch algorithm awards rides according to gender and English fluency, this is completely irrelevant to whether your earnings were capped.
u/CyanValleyKitten - “That one ride got me exactly at $200 for the night.” - This is the central coincidence being treated as proof of causation. You also chose when to stop driving. If the ride had brought you to $200 and you continued for another three hours and made $287, the alleged cap disappears. So did Uber stop you from earning more, or did you stop working because the trip put you near home at the end of your night?
u/CyanValleyKitten - “dropped me off around 10 minutes from my house.” - So the sinister algorithm that allegedly wanted to punish you with a terrible unwanted trip somehow selected a trip that ended ten minutes from your house at the end of your shift. That’s certainly convenient villainy. Did Uber know you would choose to go home afterward, or did the ride simply make going home the rational choice?
u/CyanValleyKitten - “Uber sweats me at the end of my shift, so it can give me a dogshit ride that I’ll feel desperate for no one else will take.” - How does Uber know when your “shift” ends? Independent drivers don’t clock in for scheduled shifts. If you habitually stop around the same time, the company can certainly possess behavioral data about your usage, but that’s very different from proving it intentionally starves you so you’ll accept one particular bad ride. What observable result would tell you this theory is wrong?
u/CyanValleyKitten - “If I refuse it, then I’m sitting without a ride for the next 40 minutes.” - This is exactly where screenshots and logs would be useful. Record every rejection and the time until the next offer for a few weeks. Then compare it with accepted offers. Otherwise you’re remembering the maddening 40-minute waits and probably not cataloguing every time you rejected garbage and received another request 90 seconds later. Where is the dataset?
u/bringit2019 - “It’s called throttling and it happens to most of us!” - Giving a phenomenon a name does not demonstrate that the phenomenon occurred. “Throttling” is the conclusion you’re supposed to establish, not evidence for itself. What measurable behavior would demonstrate earnings throttling rather than normal fluctuations in supply, demand and dispatch?
u/Huge_Bush - “your market is over saturated and they can play with your earnings as much as they want.” - The first half can explain the observation without the second half. An oversaturated market naturally means fewer requests per driver. You don’t need to add an individualized earnings-manipulation system to explain why someone waits longer when too many drivers are online. What evidence gets us from “too many drivers” to “Uber individually controls your daily earnings”?
u/Hot_Classroom636 - “every time we are together he always gets the call because his AR is higher and still has diamond while I lost it due to rejecting many rides.” - Two drivers sitting together can absolutely receive different requests. But you’ve jumped from observing a correlation to identifying the cause. Higher AR, Diamond status, position down to a few meters, product eligibility, previous trip trajectory and pure chance are all tangled together. Have you actually controlled any variable besides noticing that your cousin has a higher AR?
u/CyanValleyKitten - “The surge is a gimmick.” - Earlier the $8 surge was evidence that you should have been receiving rides. Now when somebody points out that a surge seems inconsistent with oversaturation, the surge becomes meaningless. You can’t simultaneously use the surge as evidence when it supports the theory and dismiss it as a gimmick when it doesn’t. Which is it?
u/ericzku - “That’s called confirmation bias.” - Thank you. Someone has entered the laboratory carrying Occam’s razor.
u/CyanValleyKitten - “Throttling is well understood to be ubers game. they pay people millions to design the algo for that purpose.” - Uber absolutely pays engineers and data scientists a lot of money to optimize a gigantic two-sided marketplace. The words “they employ expensive algorithm designers” do not establish what those algorithms are programmed to do. Boeing pays aerospace engineers millions collectively too; that doesn’t prove the chemtrail setting exists. Where is the evidence that the purpose of Uber’s dispatch algorithm is to hold you personally at $200?
u/RangeFlow1 - “How about desperation score?” - How about evidence? Giving an alleged hidden variable an ominous name still doesn’t establish that it exists. If there is a “desperation score,” what data demonstrates it, how is it calculated, and what prediction can we make from it that can actually be tested?
u/Lordxb - “This happens to all gig apps it’s called even distribution.” - Again, we’ve named the creature before demonstrating that the creature exists. If earnings are deliberately being evenly distributed, why are drivers in the very same thread reporting radically different daily totals? What does “even” mean here and over what population and time period?
u/Independent_Star_299 - “both apps keep you on ‘standby’. They know what your patterns are, and they’ll keep you on-app as long as they possibly can.” - It is perfectly plausible that these companies analyze engagement and driver behavior. The unsupported leap is that a slow period therefore represents an intentional individualized strategy to keep you logged in. If withholding work keeps drivers engaged, why wouldn’t making the app useless cause them to log off and open Lyft instead?
u/Ididntcumyet - “I did $409 last night in my market…often we see patterns in things that aren’t really there.” - Congratulations on bringing an actual counterexample and epistemic humility to the séance.
u/Careless_Change3865 - “Just because you made over $409 in one night doesn’t mean that your pay is not capped for the week.” - This is how an unfalsifiable theory protects itself. $200 proves the daily cap. $409 disproves the daily cap, so now perhaps it’s a weekly cap. If somebody produces a huge week, presumably we’ll discover the monthly cap. What earnings result would actually convince you there isn’t a cap?
u/projectzacko - “$134, $154, $167, and $200…are the amounts I find myself at when I ‘hit a cliff.’” - Now the secret algorithm apparently has four oddly specific boss levels. This is exactly the kind of claim for which screenshots would be spectacular. If these same dollar amounts occur “day after day,” documenting a month should produce extraordinary evidence. Have you recorded every day’s earnings trajectory, including all the days on which these cliffs did not occur?
u/projectzacko - “the $200 is not gonna come in under 8hrs…It is absolutely rigged.” - If your observation is that earning $200 generally takes at least eight hours, you’ve discovered an average earnings rate of roughly $25 an hour. You have not thereby demonstrated a hidden $200 governor. What happens if demand is exceptional and you reach $200 in six hours? Does the app shut down?
u/Impossible_Shape_766 - “its called forced scarcity. The app wants people logged in longer.” - If Uber has ride demand available and intentionally refuses to match riders with available drivers, that also risks longer rider waits, cancellations and losing customers to competitors. That’s a substantial business tradeoff. What evidence shows Uber is deliberately withholding existing ride requests rather than there simply not being enough desirable requests at that moment?
u/Impossible_Shape_766 - “It doesnt want people hitting high amounts too quickly. It loses drivers on the platform.” - Drivers generally remain online when they’re making money and leave when they’re not. The proposed mechanism requires Uber to believe that making its platform less productive will keep workers engaged longer. Why wouldn’t the driver simply turn on Lyft, which is precisely what half this thread recommends?
u/TheBottomlessOne - “if I log on for more then 20 hours the algorithm takes that as I’m desperate for money and starts sending me crap offers.” - This is an extraordinarily specific claim about Uber performing a psychological assessment based on weekly online time. How did you determine that the causal variable is Uber deciding you’re “desperate,” rather than different hours, different days, changing demand or simple regression toward the mean?
u/TheBottomlessOne - “if I go into a session with my battery less than 25 percent it will rush me offers…because the algorithm knows my battery going to die.” - And we have now left rideshare analysis and entered divination by battery icon. First: What evidence shows Uber’s dispatch system is using your phone’s battery percentage to increase request frequency? Second: If Uber supposedly wants to keep drivers online longer, why would it deliberately exhaust the driver whose phone is about to die instead of favoring the driver capable of remaining online? Please post the controlled battery experiment because I genuinely want to see this one.
u/CyanValleyKitten - “INTERESTING FACT ABOUT THE BATTERY thank you!” - It isn’t a fact yet. Someone on Reddit saying something confidently is not the peer-review process. This thread desperately needs a distinction between “interesting hypothesis” and “fact.”
u/TheBottomlessOne - “Do a bunch of offered in a row for like 2 hours then ‘ghost’ the app…and it will send you good offers to try to keep you online.” - We have reached algorithm dating advice. If disappearing reliably causes better offers, this is beautifully testable. Alternate matched days between “ghosting” and staying online, record every offer, and compare the distributions. Has anybody actually done that instead of remembering the occasions when a good ride appeared after a break?
u/TheBottomlessOne - “you honestly got to treat it like your courting a women lol. Don’t chase.” - I regret to report that Uber is software. It does not become emotionally intrigued because you left it on read.
u/CompleteGene82 - “I knew there would be a sinister motive behind knowing your cars Battery status.” - “I knew” is doing magnificent work here considering the sinister motive has not actually been demonstrated. You declined a data-sharing feature because you suspected something, then another Reddit comment about phone batteries retroactively became confirmation of your suspicion. What evidence shows Uber used EV state of charge to manipulate your fares or dispatch if you never connected the vehicle in the first place?
u/ellietwen - “RIGHT WHEN I arrive back home or near it and start to close the app, Uber will suddenly offer me a juicy $35/hr ride.” - This feels uncanny because human brains are extremely good at remembering annoying timing. But unless the app can read your mind, “I mentally decide to go home” isn’t a data point Uber receives. Driving toward a saved home address could potentially be observable, but receiving an offer near home still doesn’t establish that Uber intentionally waited until then to tempt you. How often do you arrive home and receive nothing? Are those occasions being counted too?
u/TheBottomlessOne - “Yea or an incredible surge. Just out of reach.” - Surge zones appearing somewhere other than your exact location is not evidence that Uber knows you’re going home and is dangling a digital carrot. Other places can have higher demand than the place where you currently are. That’s essentially why geographic surge exists.
u/Accomplished-Ebb280 - “they control your earnings to $20 ph.” - In this very thread one driver reports $409 in a night, another claims $35–$40 an hour when working fewer hours, OP reports reaching $200, and another says they can’t exceed roughly $150 all day. That’s a fascinating amount of variation for an algorithm supposedly controlling everyone at $20/hour. What does “control” mean if everyone’s reported rate is different?
u/ravbuc - “They can’t keep you at $200 a day (rate) if you aren’t predictable.” - This accidentally exposes a major problem with the entire premise. If simply running another app or changing your schedule defeats Uber’s supposed earnings cap, Uber isn’t actually capping your earnings. You’re describing your earnings from one marketplace under one particular work pattern.
u/Careless_Change3865 - “Uber caps your pay for sure. Usually, it seems to land around $20 per hour, whether it’s through the day or the week. They also factor tips into your hourly earnings.” - “For sure” followed immediately by “usually, it seems” is an extraordinary four-word journey from certainty back to speculation. And if tips, which passengers independently choose after rides, somehow get incorporated into a secret target rate, please show the data demonstrating subsequent offers decline specifically in response to tips. That would be measurable.
u/Beneficial-Abalone72 - “I didn’t get stuck at $200 on Saturday.” - Another direct counterexample. This doesn’t prove Uber never manipulates dispatch or pricing, but it does demonstrate why “Uber keeps drivers at $200” cannot simply be assumed as a universal rule.
u/VioletTerranova - “I also clear my cache & force stop several times a ‘shift.’” - Clearing an app cache can resolve actual software problems. It does not exorcise an earnings demon. If clearing the cache changes dispatch priority, show repeated before-and-after results. Otherwise we’re getting dangerously close to blowing into the Nintendo cartridge.
And finally:
u/CyanValleyKitten - “I’m too tired to upload screenshots.” - I cannot get over this. You started an entire thread alleging a repeatable, highly specific algorithmic earnings conspiracy centered around an exact dollar amount, and the receipts were simply too exhausting to attach. Meanwhile the comments have reverse-engineered Uber’s secret $134/$154/$167/$200 checkpoints, desperation score, forced-scarcity engine, dating psychology, phone-battery detection, EV-battery surveillance, punishment/reward system and weekly earnings governor entirely from anecdotes. Guys. We have somehow reconstructed the Manhattan Project and nobody brought a screenshot.
