Image source @ Visual China
Text | Those things about the Internet
The "Spring Festival" can be called a miracle of population migration in the world.
What is the specific concept of the flow of spring transportation? More than 3 billion trips in 40 days are equivalent to emptying the total population of Africa, the Americas, South America, Europe and Oceania in a short period of time.
In the past, the Spring Festival was hundreds of kilometers of straight hard seats from the city back to the county seat, and the nostalgia of more than ten hours or days and nights rushed to it, but now, the scenery of the Spring Festival has long changed its appearance.
A history of the Spring Festival, but also the history of the development of the country, behind the "relaxed and calm", is the rapid rise of the mainland's transportation capacity.
At present, the total mileage of the mainland railway has reached 146,000 kilometers, which is equivalent to three and a half circles of the earth, covering 99% of the country's cities with a population of more than 200,000.
Among them, the high-speed rail mileage is 37,900 kilometers, the world's first, close to the length of the equator, and even more than the rest of the world combined.
2014 was the peak of passenger traffic in the history of the Spring Festival, with an average transport distance of 585 kilometers and an average travel time of 436 minutes. By 2018, the average transport distance had become 524 kilometers, and the average travel time had been reduced to 327 minutes.
In the case of little change in distance, the time was shortened by a full 100 minutes, which gave the homecoming wanderers more time to spend with relatives and friends.
With the improvement of the Spring Festival capacity, we have changed from the former "can't buy a ticket" to the current "can't buy the ticket you want", and this homecoming ticket has become 12306, a ticket purchase platform, a third-party ticket-snatching software and a scalper's shura field.
The transition from Spring Festival 1.0 to 2.0: the Internet debuted on the stage
Time back to 1994, this year, the national Spring Festival passenger traffic exceeded the 1 billion mark for the first time, and countless workers went out to the coastal cities to make a living.
Railway stations in coastal areas near the Spring Festival, such as Guangzhou Station, gather a large number of scalpers within a few kilometers of the Spring Festival.
Every morning when the ticket is issued, the ticket-buying crowd is like the school canteen of the meal, a large number of people rush to the ticket gate, the crowd is pulling each other's clothes corners, closely pushing the line forward, afraid of being forced to cut in line.
The staff will also use eye-catching red markers to mark the serial number on the back of the passenger's hand, and at that time, the ticket is not to see who has fast Internet speed and high hand speed, but a pure physical work.
From 1994 to 2000, the Spring Festival bought tickets for the 1.0 era.
Of course, at this time, there is often a group of people who are entrenched outside the railway station, yes, scalpers, and it is they who and the Spring Festival have jointly built the 1.0 era of spring transportation tickets.
They rely on "special channels" and hire buyers to grab tickets, and the queue is not enough, and even staged a hoarding drama, using local factions as the origin to build a distribution system.
"Chaoshan Gang", "Northeast Gang", "Hunan Gang"... Their business thinking is not close to the same, such as the "Chaoshan Gang", known for being proficient in the secondary market operation of tickets, according to media reports at the time, in the 90s, a train ticket from Guangzhou to Chongqing was only 114 yuan.
But after the "Chaoshan Gang" has passed, the price will be speculated to increase the price by dozens, or even hundreds of yuan, and the amount of the price increase depends on the degree to which they are eager to return home.
Of course, mastering consumer psychology is only a primary technique, and the grasp of ticket lines is their core competitiveness.
Tickets for popular transit stations such as Beijing and Shanghai can even be fried to four or five hundred under the operation of the distribution system as long as they are "plated down".
You should know that the four or five hundred yuan in the nineties was enough to invite guests to eat McDonald's fast food for 6 people, and it was five times for guests. There are even rumors that some bosses who later rose in Guangdong, their first bucket of gold is to earn more than 100,000 yuan by relying on the Spring Festival scalping tickets.
The relationship between the scalper and the passengers is also very ambiguous, and it is a good thing to get a train ticket from the scalper's hand, although the premium is quite high, but it is a good thing to be able to get out of the jianghu of the railway station and return to the happy hometown.
2000-2011, Spring Festival buy tickets 2.0 era.
By 2000, the city was riding the Internet trend, with 8.9 million Internet users and 3.5 million computers with Internet access.
Today's Internet three-yuan Tencent, Ali, Baidu have been established. In the same year, Beijing began to try to launch the first generation of online booking system "Shoutie Online".
Although computers began to spread widely at that time, it was not easy to buy a train ticket online. In the era of dial-up Internet access, dozens of KB of Internet speed is not enough to see, not to mention the purchase of tickets also have to pay 2 yuan to 24 yuan service fee, and to become a member, in order to enjoy six days in advance booking.
In the face of the impact of booking traffic on holidays, "Shoutie Online" has repeatedly jumped on the edge of paralysis and normalcy, and soon after announced the suspension of business.
Shanghai, which is also a first-tier city, saw such a situation and was obliged to take over the baton of online booking, and even provided door-to-door service, but the website was closed due to network failures after only one day of online.
This Internet ticket snatching 2.0 era is like the air in the bagged potato chips, not to say that there is no sense of existence, it can only be said that there is no sense of existence, almost no effect.
The East is not bright and the West is bright, and buying tickets for people depends on the scalpers of the original ticket-snatching 1.0 era, whose story of getting rich continues until the middle of 2011.
Spring Festival 3.0 era: 12306 online
Around 2010, online ticketing businesses such as more market-oriented airplane tickets and bus tickets had already opened their doors to private websites.
As a railway ticket with strong public facility attributes, there is still no action, until June 2011, 12306 was officially launched, which also marked the decline of the original scalper 1.0 era, and the Spring Festival ticket purchase also entered the 3.0 era.
Internet booking ideally means that buying tickets for the Spring Festival no longer needs to queue up at crowded ticket windows, but the reality is very bone.
In the 40 days of the Spring Festival in 2012, the number of passengers transported during the Spring Festival exceeded 3 billion for the first time.
12306, the booking system that has just been launched, is not able to enter at all, and after entering, the booking button cannot be opened, and the payment information cannot be returned.
It can be said that in the face of the terrible traffic of the Spring Festival, no Internet giant can even resist such a traffic impact, which is not only a simple problem in the technical category.
At that time, IBM was involved in the system construction consulting of 12306, and the solution he came up with was IBM's patented "Z/TPF booking engine".
But the plan at that time did not conform to the strong public attributes of the railway, IBM Lion wide open quotation is too high, in some special periods can not guarantee timely maintenance.
Later, with the trend of marketization, 12306 found the Internet giant and grafted the architecture of 12306 to the cloud of this Internet company, after all, they are all platforms for selling things, and there are some similarities.
In 2015, 12306 survived the peak of 28.7 billion daily visits, and had to endure such a large amount of traffic in such a short period of time, which must have sacrificed the hair of countless programmers.
At this time, the former scalpers have also completed the digital super evolution, from the former spelling manpower to the competition of computing power, they seize the opportunity, and the technical attack and defense are not happy with the 12306 fight.
Yes, their weapons are no longer human distribution systems, no longer local clan-style customer acquisition, but acceleration packages.
With the wave of mobile Internet around 2015, the red-clad sect leader of 360 relied on the programmer "Iron Army" to take the lead in launching the "360 Ticket Rush Three Generations", focusing on the concept of mobile phone and computer synchronous ticket snatching.
Although Ctrip does not have the "iron army" of 360 programmers, it has money and has launched an acceleration package service by buying and buying "Zhixing Train Tickets".
Since then, the Spring Festival ticket rush has entered the 4.0 era.
Spring Festival 4.0 Era: Is the Acceleration Pack Useful?
It seems that the Spring Festival scalpers have disappeared, but they have not completely disappeared, and they have completed the digital turn and existed in the mobile phones of every returnee.
Here first say in advance, according to the official information, the priority of the railway ticketing system is like this, the ticket hall system - 12306 - Internet ticket snatching platform.
That is to say, where to go, Fliggy, Ctrip such APP is actually no ticket in hand, grab the ticket quickly to have a ticket, the work they do is very simple, just to help you buy tickets on the only ticket purchase channel 12306.
The difference between them and our ticket purchase is that you have to click and go on the website, while the ticket snatching software only needs to connect directly to the 12306 server, reducing various jump times and achieving millisecond-level response speed, while users with acceleration packages only need to pay.
These digital scalpers are rich and equipped with a bunch of "big and wide" network dedicated lines, and users can enjoy faster speeds the more expensive acceleration packages they buy.
The price of these acceleration packages is about 0 to 70 yuan, and these acceleration packages may be of little use at the beginning, but such an operation 12306 is naturally reluctant.
Why? Because these ticket-snatching platforms continue to repeat ticket-snatching actions through continuous refresh, the access of high-frequency words brings a large amount of useless traffic to increase the server burden, not to mention, it is likely to be intercepted by 12306, and even blacklisted.
And all your ticket purchase information is first handed over to the third-party platform, and then submitted to 12306, increasing the risk of information leakage.
Also, did you find that? The acceleration package is very good in line with the current "inner volume model", the person who buys the ticket just changes the queue in one place, and the ticket is limited, the advanced acceleration package replaces the low level, but there will be more advanced acceleration packages to replace the former.
The huge amount of data increases the burden of 12306, squeezing the ticket purchase opportunities of manual users, and those users who rely on the help of friends to get the acceleration package are divided into the lowest priority weight by the third-party ticketing platform. End up with an empty end of popularity and tickets.
After all, from the perspective of the product manager's grasp of human nature, users who have spent money and silver must be well served, not to mention the small trick of stimulating the psychology of ticket buyers.
In this competition for tickets, as the price of the acceleration package rises, the money is full of scalper platforms.
To this end, 12306 and these digital scalpers have launched a decade of offensive and defensive wars, and various snake god-indistinguishable graphic verification codes are to block scalpers who frequently swipe tickets.
However, graphic recognition is not a unique ability of humans, and digital scalpers have their own countermeasures to sacrifice the "machine learning" dafa to improve the recognition accuracy of image verification.
Technology is not guilty, but people have hearts. At one point, the programmers of ticket-snatching software even increased the recognition rate of tricky "two-word verification" from 10% to 80%!
Not only that, even if the remaining 20% cannot be recognized, these digital scalpers have another trick that is manual verification, and the highest-level technology often uses the most simple method to crack.
Digital scalpers in the online earning part-time group to ask a bunch of housewives, uncles and aunts, college students part-time recognition verification code, maybe they know more than the rice circle fans what the love beans look like.
After that, from IP blockade to IP transformation, from artificial intelligence to risk control algorithm models, 12306 and digital scalpers have come and gone for nearly a decade.
Until 12306, after accumulating tens of billions of user behavior data, the digital scalper was identified according to 25 feature vectors such as the proportion of refunds and changes, the frequency of address changes, and common contacts.
In the Spring Festival of 2018, in 18.36 billion visits in 3 hours, it intercepted almost half, with this shield in front, 12306 launched the "standby ticket function", directly hitting the life of the digital scalper.
To put it bluntly, the biggest value of the digital scalper is to help users grab tickets day and night when passengers can't grab tickets, which is good, 12306 official directly help users make up tickets.
Today's digital scalpers' acceleration package trick is more like a psychological placebo and a traffic trick of slashing a knife, and whether it can really grab the ticket is metaphysics.
For most people, the train ticket is not just a commodity, but an opportunity to go home during the Spring Festival, and every year those who line up in the ticket hall all night, those who also need a green-skinned train often need this significant train ticket the most.
This is also the final bottom line of trains as public facilities, rather than vehicles that can float prices like airplanes and cars, so the price discrimination and supply and demand curve in economics are pale.
In last year's Spring Festival, the number of network hits on the peak day of 12306 reached 149.5 billion times, of which there were half of the digital scalpers in addition to ordinary passengers, and Google, the world's highest-hit website, also had 6 billion times.
And the dynamic SKU of 12306 is not just to do addition and subtraction so simple, if you want to buy tickets from Beijing West to Zhuozhou East, then you have to subtract Beijing West to Zhuozhou East in the SKU library, often Taobao this kind of stop.
But 12306 also needs to increase the SKUs from Zhuozhou East to other sites, and then the sites have to increase the SKUs with each other, and then add the factor of seat selection, the entire amount of computation is constantly multiplying, and such operations must be completed in a few milliseconds.
These two examples are just the tip of the iceberg of technical difficulty behind 12306, which is why 12306 is so praised in programmer circles, which is a perverted level algorithm and countless hairs that programmers have lost.
This year, due to the epidemic, the pre-sale period of the Spring Festival has changed from 30 days to 15 days, and everyone will grab tickets together in a shorter period of time, and various digital scalpers have also taken the opportunity to render ticket rush anxiety.
However, you don't have to spend money to buy any acceleration packages, which is artificial anxiety, not a real supply and demand anxiety, and shortening the pre-sale period requires the dual strength of transportation capacity and technology.
The amount of mainland roads sent is more than 6 times that of the railway, and the high-speed free and motorcycle fleets are not indispensable, and the fare discount of the "reverse Spring Festival" allows parents to share the waste of transportation capacity on the return journey of the Spring Festival train from small cities to their children's big cities.
And can not buy has evolved to buy the desired tickets, with the development of 12306 also gives more room for back-home techniques such as back-up ballots, cross-station ballots, and intermediate transfers.
Can't buy a ticket to get on the bus to make up for the ticket, buy a full ticket to get off the bus in advance is also a riot operation of the Spring Festival gods.
So can you guess that the scalpers of the 1.0 era still have room to live? Now the ticket purchase is a real-name system, hoarding tickets has become a thing of the past, and even if you get a ticket, there is also an identity verification for the pit stop.
So the scalpers of the 1.0 era came up with the ultimate answer, they directly connected the customer to the propulsion station after other passengers verified the gate, and the most high-end technology often lost to the roughest logic, the old trisomy.
Behind every ticket for the Spring Festival, it carries the dream of wandering outside for a year, and also carries the expectation of a family reunion dream.
65 years ago, the earliest Spring Festival was only 23 million passenger traffic, from the green train to the high-speed rail, the era of the Spring Festival homecoming road is also more and more calm, this is our homecoming life mark, but also the epitome of the era of great changes and development.
There is no second country in the world that will carry such a huge passenger traffic, and this miracle belongs to the people who are looking for a way back every day.