Introducing DoorDash Tasks

DoorDash just rolled out Tasks, tiny gigs Dashers can do beyond delivery—think snapping real photos of restaurant dishes, hotel entrances, even helping a robot stuck on the curb. There’s also a pilot app where people film everyday actions or speak another language to train AI, with pay shown upfront. Sounds handy, right? The comments section turned it into a soap opera. One camp cheers the extra income and calls them “IRL side quests.” Another sees a corporate rebrand of gig precarity: as one critic snarked, it’s the old “no benefits, but make it ‘flexible’” routine. Several readers suspect it’s really about stockpiling AI training data, not just “helping businesses,” with one dry quip: “Maybe it’s more for building datasets.” The exclusion of California, New York City, Seattle, and Colorado set off legal tea-leaf reading—simonw asked why, and floated a theory (via Claude) about tougher gig worker protections making this riskier there. Old-school internet folks clocked this as Mechanical Turk, but IRL—crowdwork in the physical world—dropping links to MTurk comparisons. And the safety jokes flew: “Definitely won’t be abused by burglars, stalkers and spies,” one user deadpanned. Love it or hate it, 2+ million Tasks since 2024 says people are already playing the side-quest economy.