What do riders tweet about the people that they meet? Analyzing online commentary about UberPool and Lyft Shared/Lyft Line

Abstract Uber and Lyft offer services, entitled UberPool and Lyft Shared (formerly Lyft Line), which allow passengers to share rides with other travelers for a discounted price. These services may reduce the number of vehicles on the road by increasing vehicle occupancy. However, there are drawbacks, including increased and unpredictable travel time and the social implications of sharing a confined space with strangers. To understand how travelers, drivers, and others understand and communicate about these services, we study online commentary about UberPool and Lyft Line on the popular micro-blogging site Twitter. We analyzed more than 2000 “tweets” about the services, coding for who tweets, the emotional tone of the tweets, and what aspects of the services are tweeted about. We find that positive tweets are quite rare and are outnumbered by negative tweets. However, the most common tone is humorous. As expected, there is considerable negative tweeting about service characteristics such as routing and travel time, and tweeters comment about how happy they are when another passenger is not picked up. However, most tweets are about other passengers and their behavior. Negative tweets about other passengers outnumber positive ones, but most tweets about other passengers feature humor about their conversation, behavior, and interactions with the tweeter. Passing on humorous observations and stories about UberPool and Lyft Line experiences with other passengers appears to be a substantial subgenre of the public discourse about sharing rides. This suggests that in many cases sharing with others may be leading to a rich cultural experience.