Understanding the Online Gig Worker Community

This study describes the evolution of the online gig worker community, and the changing content during the pandemic. To empirically capture the effect of the health crisis, I crawled Reddit posts in gig work-related subreddits from January 2019 to April 2022, a period that covered the pre-COVID era and peaks amid the surge of variants. The core research design rests on the classification of gig workers, which is based on the service type and leads to the five user cohorts in this study: in-store grocery shoppers, logistic drivers, food delivery drivers, ridesharing drivers, and e-commerce sellers. Building on the classification, I propose a descriptive framework for understanding the evolution of the online gig work community, with correspondence between each user cohort’s activity and the COVID trend, and modeling of the most common topics before and after the pandemic starts. The findings suggest that the prosperity of online gig worker communities is roughly aligned with the COVID trend, with a different pattern of flux for the following series of COVID waves other than the emergence. While the pandemic has fostered the popularity of new gig work types, some previously popular gig work types involved in physical and location-dependent interactions have lost ground quickly until the promotion of the COVID vaccine. The study proceeds by investigating the changing topics in online discussion. While the impact of the pandemic is nuanced by specific gig work characteristics, similar concerns are echoed in each user cohort. Workers exhibit more prudence on previously underestimated costs of gig work, engage in more interactions with customers, and pour out more negative implications in online discussion