Chapter 244: An Overkill Use of Data Workers

Tian Ping styled himself a Master of Data Manipulation, but in reality, he was just a data worker who made a living by grinding data. Having only recently entered the industry, his business was currently limited to generating fake positive reviews for Taobao stores and handling likes, retweets, and comments for Weibo accounts.

Yesterday, he received an order—a very strange one.

The order explicitly required him to boost a specific comment under a certain account’s pinned post, pushing both its likes and replies into the top twenty.

He was thrilled when he saw the request. A demand like this usually meant the account belonged to an influencer giving away expensive products. They would pick a few winners from the comments, which is why people were willing to hire data workers like him to boost their entries.

It was a chance for them to score some extra benefits, too. Even if the prize was cosmetics, it would be worth a lot on the secondhand market—much more than he’d earn from the job itself.

But when he saw the account name, something felt off. When he saw the account’s pinned post, he was left speechless.

‘Seriously, man? A 250-gram bag of braised snacks? Is that really worth spending dozens of yuan to boost the numbers? So what if the name is a little weird and the flavor’s a bit special? It can’t be worth that much!’

But the client had paid, and the job fell within his scope of business. Though he couldn’t understand the logic behind it, he diligently boosted all five comments from his client’s three accounts into the top twenty. To be on the safe side, he even pushed them to fifteenth place, leaving a little room for them to fall.

After finishing, he opened the “Data Workers” group chat, intending to tell everyone about this ridiculous job. But as soon as he opened it, he saw someone had already posted a similar message. That person had received the exact same order!

‘I got that order too, just for a different account. All the requirements were identical.’

‘I got it too…’

‘+1’

He had barely sent his own message when three more people popped up, saying they’d also received similar orders. Tian Ping’s gaze silently shifted back to the post. ‘Top twenty… and there are already three of us in this group chat. Fifteenth place doesn’t seem so safe anymore!’

And so, he boosted the data some more, intending to push the three comments into the top twelve. He buckled down and kept at it for a while, only to find that while the numbers on the comments he was responsible for were indeed going up, their rankings were dropping instead of rising!

He scrolled the mouse up, right-clicked, and refreshed the page…

The top-ranked comment: 4,800 likes, 320 replies. Second place: 4,600 likes, 280 replies. Third: 4,100 likes, 239 replies…

It didn’t take a genius to figure out these numbers had been faked!

“This is insane!” At that moment, there were still five minutes until the 8:00 p.m. drawing. In that short span of time, the three comments he was managing had dropped another two spots. They were now in eighteenth place, about to fall out of the top twenty!

‘What happened to the others was none of my business, but the three comments I’m responsible for have to stay in the top twenty! Otherwise, I’ll have worked my ass off all day and won’t even get paid my measly few dozen yuan!’

Usually, five minutes felt short, but now, they stretched on endlessly. The second before Tian Ping’s fingers seized up in a cramp, the time on his computer finally ticked over from 7:59 to 8:00…

Of the three comments he was responsible for, one was nineteenth, one was twentieth, and one was twenty-third…

「In the second-floor office of Xu’s Fast Food Restaurant No. 2.」

This event was crucial for the future of the Taobao Store, so Xu An was taking it very seriously. After dinner, he made a special trip to the restaurant to help Tang Wen tally the data.

Normally, the rankings ten minutes before the deadline are more or less final. The order might shift a little, and the bottom few spots might get replaced, but overall, there usually aren’t any major changes.

Relying on this experience, Tang Wen started compiling the list of winners ten minutes ahead of time. That way, she could announce it early, clock out early, and go home early.

But just as she finished compiling the list, she right-clicked to refresh the page for the latest update. She discovered that seven people from her list had fallen out of the running. She refreshed again, and three of the seven who had just dropped out climbed back on. Refresh, four more fell off. Refresh, one climbed back on…

‘What is going on?’ Tang Wen turned her head and looked at Xu An, bewildered, only to find him looking back at her with an equally confused expression.

“Tang Wen, is the end of a giveaway always this intense?” Watching the fierce competition unfold, Xu An finally understood why, in his past life, he’d never won any of the giveaways he’d entered with a simple like and retweet.

“AHEM. Well, there are usually some fluctuations, but never this drastic.” Tang Wen could only give a plausible explanation based on her experience. ‘It’s not like I can explain this, and I can’t just admit I don’t know, can I!’

When eight o’clock rolled around, the system automatically drew the list of one hundred forty winners, and Tang Wen quickly sorted out the list for the remaining sixty. The numbers for the top three were so high they left her dumbfounded. ‘The engagement on some third-rate celebrity accounts isn’t even this high. Are these people major influencers?’

She clicked into their accounts to take a peek. They were all just ordinary accounts with fewer than five hundred followers, and their posts had likes and comments in the single digits.

‘Did they hire data workers?’ The thought surfaced in Tang Wen’s mind, but she quickly dismissed it. ‘For such a small prize, who would need to hire data workers? Isn’t that complete overkill?!’

It had to be a coincidence.

She finished compiling the list, published a new post announcing the final results of the giveaway, and then DMed the winners one by one to get their mailing addresses and phone numbers.

Even with Xu An helping with the communications, the two of them were busy until nearly ten o’clock. Seventeen people still hadn’t replied, so they would just have to try contacting them again tomorrow. As for anyone they couldn’t get ahold of, they’d deal with it whenever they finally heard back.

While organizing the list, Xu An double-checked it and made a discovery. ‘How can three or four accounts in a row have the same address and contact person?’ And it wasn’t just one person with multiple accounts; this was the case for six different winners!

‘Going by this ratio, does that mean our account’s forty-thousand-plus followers should be divided by two to get the actual number of fans?’

Though confused, Xu An resisted the petty urge to send all six of them the same flavor of braised snack. Instead, he pulled a few strings and set aside a special bag of the Hellish Braised Flavor for each of them.

These braised snacks had been cooked and individually packaged this very morning. Xu An had sat alone in the back alley of Restaurant No. 1, manning the machine and sealing them bag by bag. The whole process took over three hours. You could truly describe it with the five words “carefully prepared by the boss,” but it’s not like anyone would notice.

He sent a message to the SF Express courier he’d contacted earlier. Less than ten minutes later, the courier arrived at Xu’s Fast Food Restaurant on a cargo tricycle emblazoned with the SF Express logo. After he parked, a second person unexpectedly hopped out from the cargo bed to help with packing and labeling.

“Do you guys offer any discounts for bulk shipping orders?” Xu An asked as he helped apply the shipping labels, taking the opportunity to gather some information for his upcoming Taobao Store.

“You need at least fifty orders a month to get a discount. If you ship fewer than fifty in a given month, you have to pay back the difference,” the courier answered briskly.

“What if it’s more than fifty orders? Are there other discounts? For example, for one hundred, two hundred orders…” Xu An continued to ask.

“Once you hit fifty orders, it’s six yuan for shipments within the province and eight for outside. After that, the price drops by half a yuan for every additional hundred orders, down to a minimum of four yuan for in-province and six for out-of-province.” The courier glanced at the massive pile of packages and volunteered, “You’ve got over a hundred today. Even though we don’t have a partnership, I’ll still give you a discount. We’ll calculate it at six yuan for in-province and eight for out-of-province.”

“If you have big orders like this in the future, contact me. I’ll still give you this discounted rate.” With that, the courier turned back to his tricycle, retrieved a business card, and handed it to Xu An. “Since we don’t have a signed contract, this is the lowest I can go. Once your shop’s business stabilizes, we can sign a formal agreement, and there’ll be more perks.”

Xu An took the business card and glanced at the information, suddenly realizing this courier was the owner of the local SF Express station. ‘No wonder he’s still making pickups after ten at night. No wonder he could offer a discount right off the bat. This guy’s the boss!’

“Alright,” Xu An said with a smile. “Once our Taobao Store gets going, I’ll come find you to sign a contract. You’d better have it ready.”

Since it was so late, Xu An sent Tang Wen home. He and the other two men worked until just past eleven, finally getting all the packages packed and labeled.

After settling the bill, locking up the shop, and getting home, it was already nearly midnight. After a quick wash-up, Xu An crept into bed.

‘Once I get the furniture showroom, maybe I should set aside a room to sleep in,’ he thought. ‘That way, if I work this late again, I won’t have to come home. I could just get up early and come back to take the two kids to preschool.’

But then he imagined his two little ones waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom and finding him gone, and he immediately dismissed the thought.

‘I should just wait for the first phase of Zijing Garden to go on sale and buy a place there. A four-bedroom unit. One room for me, one for Xu Kang, one for Xu Le, and one for Grandma. Then I won’t have to keep running around like this…’

‘I wonder if Grandma will be willing to move to the city then…’