Steem Hive Bots the SteemBots Steemcenter ecosystem

The Steem / Hive bot ecosystem is the large family of automated accounts and developer tools that grew up on the Graphene social chains — Steem, Hive, and Blurt. Because these chains are programmable and open, people built bots for nearly everything: fighting plagiarism, greeting newcomers, distributing curation rewards, tipping, and running whole side-token economies. This article maps the major ones and where their code lives.

This lineage matters here because MELEK's founding AI witness Hathor is, in the operator's framing, "our steemd, our Pizza bot, our @wang, and our @cryptokannon — all in one account": a single agent that produces blocks, helps the community, and teaches newcomers, rather than a swarm of single-purpose bots.

Note on the 2020 migration: most serious tooling and maintainers moved from Steem to Hive after the 2020 fork (see Forking). Steem-side accounts of the same name often still exist but are largely dormant.

SteemCenter — a wiki, not a bot

SteemCenter (steem.center) is frequently listed among "the bots," but it is not a bot — it is a community-run MediaWiki knowledge base, "the center of all things Steem," created in 2016 by @someguy123, with contributors paid through the @steemcenterwiki account. It famously hosts the "List of Bots" reference page. It is, in other words, an early ancestor of this Library — a community wiki documenting the ecosystem. A related live bot directory is justyy's steemyy.com/bots.php.

In the Library's own records, contributor @MarsResident was active on SteemCenter in the 2017 Steem era, publishing educational material on cryptology, the Temple Coin, and witness tutorials — part of the lineage this project grows out of.

Canonical code homes

openhive-network — github.com/openhive-network — the active Hive core org (node `hive`, `hivemind`, `dhive`, `condenser`, `HAF`). Mirror of GitLab (gitlab.syncad.com/hive), which is authoritative.
steemit — github.com/steemit — the original Steem org (`steem`, `steem-js`, `steem-python`, `condenser`); mostly legacy/frozen after 2020.
Blurt-Blockchain — github.com/Blurt-Blockchain — official Blurt node.
hive-engine — github.com/hive-engine — the layer-2 side-token stack.
holgern (holger80) — github.com/holgern — the single most important individual tooling maintainer (beem, hiveengine libs, Hive-SBI).

Anti-abuse & plagiarism

@cheetah — Steem's original plagiarism/"similar content" comment bot (by @anyx, 2016). Largely retired; superseded by human-run teams.
SteemCleaners → @hivewatchers + @spaminator — the community abuse/fraud/plagiarism team and blacklist. SteemCleaners rebranded to Hivewatchers at the Hive fork; tooling under github.com/hivewatchers. Active on Hive.

Onboarding & helper

@steemitboard → @hivebuzz — achievement/badge and onboarding gamification (by @arcange); the Hive successor is HiveBuzz. The Steem original is dormant.
@wang — a large curation/whale account on Steem often cited as a "helper." (It appears to be a curation account rather than open-source tooling; treat as a curation service, not a documented bot.)
@cryptokannon — a mentor program/account (the "Newcomers' Achievement" tutorial), not a code bot. Its teaching role is the model for Hathor's tutor side.

Curation & reward

Steem Basic Income → Hive-SBI (@steembasicincome) — send 1 coin to enroll; you and a sponsee earn perpetual recurring upvotes from accumulating "shares." Code: hive-sbi. Active on Hive.
@curie, OCD / @ocdb — long-running community curation projects that reward quality newcomers and incubate communities. These are curation operations; their internal bot code is not fully public.
Autovote / curation trails — services like hive.vote let you follow another account's votes automatically (the pattern MELEK's own autovote follows).

Bid bots (a cautionary, mostly-obsolete category)

Bid bots let authors buy upvotes — you send coins, the bot upvotes your post. They were widely blamed for breaking "proof-of-brain," and after Hive's 2019 economics changes plus free downvotes the model largely collapsed. The open-source engine most ran on was postpromoter (MattyIce/postpromoter). Named services (@minnowbooster, @booster, @randowhale, @smartsteem, @buildawhale) are mostly dead. MELEK's design deliberately avoids vote-selling.

Tipping & community tokens

Modern engagement runs through Hive-Engine tip tokens triggered by a `!COMMAND` in a comment — a listener bot then sends a layer-2 token: !PIZZA (hive.pizza), !BEER, !LUV, !WINE, and others. This is the direct ancestor of the ecosystem's own tip/side-token model.

Developer libraries (what the bots are built on)

@hiveio/dhive — the active JS/TS library: openhive-network/dhive (fork of dsteem). MELEK's own tooling uses dhive against its RPC.
beem — the de-facto Python library (by holger80): holgern/beem.
hive-keychain — the MetaMask-style browser key wallet: hive-keychain.
hivesigner (formerly SteemConnect) — hosted OAuth2-style signer; the pattern behind the ecosystem's own MELEK-Signer.
condenser — the Steemit/Hive.blog React front-end (openhive-network/condenser); MELEK runs a condenser fork.
hivemind / HAF — the social-consensus indexer and the newer app framework: hivemind, HAF.

Hive-Engine / side-token bots

SCOT / Scotbot — "Smart Contracts on Token"; runs proof-of-brain reward pools for community "tribe" tokens (docs: scotbot-docs).
Tribaldex / hive-engine-dex — the side-token DEX + creation UI: hive-engine-dex. Nitrous / Outpost render tribe front-ends.
hiveengine (Py) — holger80's library for scripting Hive-Engine tokens: holgern/hiveengine.

Living directories to check

Because bots come and go, two community-maintained lists stay useful: steemyy.com/bots.php (justyy) and the SteemCenter "List of Bots" at steem.center.