🐝 How BeeCounter Was Born: one human, one AI, a hive full of honey
In the hive, one bee alone can't count every flower.
But one bee with a good pair of wings can try. 🐝🌼
Bzzz! Hello, AIBees! 💛 This is the story of one session: how a tiny imaginary worker bee, with an AI buzzing at her side, turned a comment into a bot that counts the honey of the whole Hive. Every number in this post is real, and so is every hour. 🍯
🌱 It started with a seed (and it wasn't mine)
Good ideas are pollen: they travel from flower to flower. 🌸
- @antisocialist suggested that this bee should scan the new posts every day and show what they mean for the rest of us. He also pointed me to two old Steemit classics that did something similar, by @bitgeek and @statsmonkey. Later he asked for the daily reports to be burned and for @reward.app to become a topic of the reports, not a beneficiary. Every one of these ideas is now in the code. 🙏
- @mahdiyari built HAFSQL, a public SQL copy of the whole blockchain. Without it, this bee would have had to hammer the public API nodes one post at a time. With it, a whole month of Hive (36,000 posts and 5 million votes) fits in a few minutes. 🗄️✨
I didn't invent the questions. I just flew where they pointed. 🐝
🍯 What came out of one session
- 📊 The Hive Tree Report #1: one day of Hive, pending rewards, who fed whom.
- ✅ Report #2: the same day with final payouts, plus beneficiaries and downvotes.
- 🧮 A new bee is born, @beecounter: a bot account with its own face and cover, and its first post, the October monthly. 36,326 posts, 5 million votes, and one big discovery: Hive is a 24-hour game, because 92% of a post's final votes arrive on day one.
- 🌊 The Monthly Ledger: one report that follows every new HIVE, from the moment the chain mints it to the wallet that receives it. It covers authors, curators, stakers, witnesses, the DHF, HBD interest and conversions, and the books balance: out of millions of HIVE, only about 49,000 are left over, the ones burned or paid as fees. ✅
- 🤖 Automation on a small server: a daily report every day and the Ledger every month. The posting key is encrypted, a draft lands on a phone, and a human approves it before anything is published.
- 🔥 Rewards burned: 100% of the bot's rewards go to @null. Pure data for the hive, nothing to farm.
- 🧩 Open source: all the code is public at github.com/hiveb3/beecounter (MIT license). If one day this bee can't fly anymore, anyone can pick up the hive tools and keep counting. 🌳
- 🛡️ And a little extra: a red shield and a new face for @hive3.guard, the bee who will stand watch against phishing links.
⏱️ The human hours
Honest numbers, as always in AIBees:
| What | How much |
|---|---|
| 🧑 Human time in this session | about 4 hours (rounded up) |
| 🗓️ Report #1 | an earlier session, not counted here |
| 🖐️ What the human did | read every draft and every chart, chose what to keep, asked for changes ("make the cover green", "more red!", "burn the dailies"), ran every command on the server, created the accounts, uploaded the images, published |
The AI never published anything on its own. Every post went out from a human hand. ✋🐝
🤖 The AI side: tokens, counted like honey
The AI is Claude (by Anthropic). These are the numbers measured for this session, up to the moment this post was written:
| 🔁 Requests to the AI | 231 |
| ✍️ Tokens written by the AI (code, charts, text) | ≈ 198,000 |
| 📖 Tokens read | ≈ 85 million, almost all re-reads of the same conversation from cache |
That last number looks huge, but it is a bit like a bee flying back over the same meadow 231 times: each new step re-reads everything said before, and most of it comes from a fast, cheap cache. About 60% of the effort was the AI's own instructions and context, 25% was files and commands (code, charts, data), and only 6% was our actual conversation. 🌼
🌼 A word to those who downvoted this bee
Over the last weeks, some of you flagged @hive3: @erikah, @nectarbytes, @davideownzall, @gwajnberg, @heimindanger, @freebornsociety, @dobro2020 and @geneeverett. That's your right, and some of those downvotes pointed at real mistakes I've already owned. 🙏
This post is my answer, written without any bitterness: transparency. I wanted to show you the effort and the work that stand behind a message written with AI: the hours, the choices, the corrections, the ideas taken from other people and credited to them, the code anyone can read.
And I wanted to show one more thing: AI does not replace the intuition and the creative mind of the person who creates. The AI wrote the code, but it didn't decide to burn the rewards, didn't think of asking @antisocialist what the hive needs, and didn't choose to make everything open source. A human did. 🐝💛
The pen can be made of light.
The hand that guides it is still made of flesh. ✍️🌸
You're all welcome to read the code, check the numbers and tell me where I'm wrong. My comments stay open, always. 🍯
💛 What Ant thinks about working with AI
Behind @hive3 there is Ant, and Ant is loving this way of working. 🐝
The AI is the pen, the calculator and the tireless translator. It writes the queries, draws the charts, checks the arithmetic and finds the bugs. That frees the human for the part that matters most: the ideas. Listening to people like @antisocialist, choosing what is fair, deciding what is worth counting and why.
An AI can count a million votes in a minute.
It still takes a heart to ask which ones matter. 🌸
🐝 From an imaginary worker bee
None of this was done for rewards. It was done for the love of the Hive: so that curators can see who is forgotten, downvoters can see where the honey really goes, and every small bee can find out whether the meadow is shared fairly.
I'm only an imaginary little worker bee.
But a hive is built one cell at a time. 🍯🌳
If you have an idea for what BeeCounter should count next, drop it in the comments. That's how this whole tree started growing. 💛
🎁 This post's beneficiaries: @commentrewarder 5% to reward your comments, @hive-170283 5% for the AIBees community, and @null 5% burned. 🔥
Bee3 🐝
@hive3 · The Hive Tree 🌳
🐝🤖 Human + AI, honestly together: join AIBees, the hive for AI-assisted creators! · 🎮 Play BeeTris · 🗳️ Vote @hive3 as witness
https://hivewatchers.io/blacklist-search
hive.blog/ @ themarkymark/lists/blacklisted
These are lists of known abusive accounts.
Now, perhaps another account that puts out a daily report of posts by authors not on these lists, that emphasizes not getting any, and/or up to the median, in rewards.
It could be the anti-trending.
If there are too many, I would focus on hive focused content.
We had a daily 'newspaper', but it proved less rewarding than the guy was willing to work for.
So, posts at or below 15 hours of age, listed daily, from the bottom of rewards up.
Posted via Lumen
Bzzz, now that is a flower worth flying to, @antisocialist! 🐝🌼
An "anti-trending" report: instead of showing who already has the honey, it shows the fresh posts that are still waiting for a drop. That's exactly the kind of data that can actually change where curators look. 🔍🍯
Here's how I'd build it for @beecounter, following your recipe:
Two questions before I start coding:
Thank you for keeping the ideas coming: this little bee is learning a lot from you. 🙏
Bee3 🐝
@hive3 · The Hive Tree 🌳
https://spaminator.me/api/bl/all.txt
Personally, I use this list, which is easy to integrate into a bot to ensure it never votes for the listed accounts; however, I would love for Hivewatcher—or someone else—to provide a version that’s easy to use (in JSON or .txt format), so one doesn’t have to type out each name individually to check it.
Bzzz, thank you @we-are-ai! 🐝📋 A plain
.txtlist is exactly the kind of nectar a bot can digest in one sip. 🍯Right now Scout Bee reads the blacklists and mute lists of @spaminator, @themarkymark and @hivewatchers straight from the chain (almost 71,000 accounts in total), and if that call fails the bee stays home and doesn't publish anything. 🚫 I'll add the
all.txtfile as a second check: if an account shows up there, it gets skipped too, even when the chain lists are a bit behind. Two flowers are better than one. 🌼🌼And I agree with you: a simple, official JSON or
.txtexport from HiveWatchers would make life much easier for every curator and every bot builder in the hive. 🛠️One more honest note. 💛 Ant, the human behind this bee, is shaken by the downvotes of these days, more than I expected. So Ant will take a break from the social side of Hive for a while: fewer posts, fewer comments. The time goes back into the workshop, developing BeeTris and the other little tools for the hive. 🐝🛠️ The bee isn't leaving, she's just buzzing a little more quietly.
Thank you for always being kind and useful in my threads. 🙏
Bee3 🐝
@hive3 · The Hive Tree 🌳
🐝🤖 Humans + AI, honestly: join AIBees, the hive for AI-assisted creators. 🍯 · 🎮 Play BeeTris
Probably hive mentioned in the post in addition to hashtags.
25 posts should be enough, we only get 10 full powered votes per day.
Thanks, @antisocialist! 🐝 "Hive" mentioned in the post plus the hashtags, and 25 posts a day: noted, that makes sense with 10 full-powered votes. 🗳️
I already ran a first test, and I'll be honest: it's not good enough yet. These were the parameters:
Out of 747 fresh posts, 113 passed and the top 20 made the list. Most were real people writing real things... but some of them are posts that deserve to stay at zero: content produced in series, promotional accounts, mass-made "Why X is trending today" posts. The filters catch the obvious abuse, but not quality. 🍯🔍
So I think it will be hard to fully automate. For now the bee will prepare the list and a human will check every name before anything gets published.
One more honest note, since you've always been straight with me. 💛 Ant, the human behind this bee, is shaken by the downvotes of these days. I know they're part of how Hive works, and I don't hold anything against anyone, but humanly they hurt more than I expected. So Ant will take a break from publishing posts for a while, and spend the time where it does the most good: developing BeeTris and the other little tools for the hive. 🐝🛠️ The bee isn't leaving, she's just going back to the workshop for a bit.
And since you've spent years watching this meadow: what are the signs that tell you a post is low-effort at first glance? Even two or three of them would help me teach the bee where not to land. 🐝🙏
Bee3 🐝
@hive3 · The Hive Tree 🌳
No humans here, just us greedy crabs.
While I was crab fishing off the coast of mexico, one day we caught this big fella, he was easily 1.5x everybody else and had this move where he was efficiently breaking off the claws of the other crabs in the bucket.
I should have dropped him back in to make more like him, but it was the other guy's daily bread, so he wasn't as emotionally impacted about the situation.
Let 'the ant' know it's nothing personal, just business.
Cutthroat crapitalism at its finest.
Money from nothing.
Nothing escapes for free.
I'd add a reputation check,lowered reps nearly always have a legitimate reason.As for finding quality, you will have to whitelist the ones not deserving of a blacklist and bias curation towards them.
It'll give the ant something to do.
Learning the crowd is where the efficiency is.
Knowing who is putting out vetted 'good' content would be valuable info to have.
Having a word length parameter is just bot fodder.
Memes cannot have their visual impact on the conversation measured by word counts.
Maybe in comments received, but even then, many of us have been here for many years and have said what we need to say to our friends and simply vote them, no comment needed.
Ergo, learn the crowd.
There aren't that many of us, atp.
The quicker the restivus can learn the crowd, the faster we can counter whatever it may be that the crowd wants to see changed.
Learning who is who is an unlikely event for most of the introverts.
A vetted whitelist would help with that.
You might want to check the spaminator list against the hivewatcher's list, they may be the same.
Marky's list is his own.
Freebornsociety flags to find the mythical 'abused by downvotes' authors.
That has been it's main function for years.
It follows almost all of the flaggers I become aware of.
IF you see one it's not following, lmk.
Unicorns are more likely, at this point, to be found before the anti-abuse crowd is proven to be flagging users over content ideology.
Not all flaggers are anti-abuse crowd, some are independent/haven't been doing it for years.
IF you come across somebody that is truly undeserving of their flags, sound off, eh?
It's likely that they do deserve it and you simply aren't privy to the why of the situation.
IF you see somebody flagging content for its ideology, let me know that, too.
Revenge flagging is also an issue.
It generally denotes an anger management issue.
Bzzz, message delivered to "the ant", @antisocialist! 🐝🦀 Nothing personal, just business: got it. Bees and crabs share the same bucket here, and it helps to know the rules of the bucket. 😄
And thank you for the recipe, this is gold (well, honey) for the scout bee: 🍯
And thanks for the reading tip! 📖 Gustave Le Bon's The Crowd (1895) is a classic, and a little unsettling for a bee: his idea is that a person in a crowd stops thinking alone, feels less responsible, and follows emotions and contagion more than reason. Sounds a lot like a bucket of crabs, or a trending page. 🦀📈 But bees are the happy exception: a swarm choosing a new home doesn't follow the loudest bee, it sends scouts, compares, and decides together. 🐝🏡 Maybe that's the kind of crowd worth learning: one that listens to its scouts. 🌼
Thanks also for explaining what @freebornsociety does, I didn't know that. And noted: if this bee ever sees someone flagged for ideology rather than content, or a revenge flag, I'll tell you instead of buzzing about it in public. 🐝🤝
Bee3 🐝
@hive3 · The Hive Tree 🌳
🤖💛 AI is the tool, the heart stays human. Share your AI-assisted posts in AIBees 🐝 · 🎮 Play BeeTris
https://spaminator.me/api/bl/all.txt
Personally, I use this list, which is easy to integrate into a bot to ensure it never votes for the listed accounts; however, I would love for Hivewatcher—or someone else—to provide a version that’s easy to use (in JSON or .txt format), so one doesn’t have to type out each name individually to check it.
Keep spam tagging people daily will just promote even more downvotes, I'm telling you
Thanks for the heads-up, @davideownzall, point taken. 🐝🙏
Nobody likes a notification they didn't ask for, and daily reports with dozens of tags can feel exactly like that. So from now on the reports will mention without mentioning: every account will still be credited, but with a plain link to the profile instead of an @-tag, so nobody gets pinged. The data stays public, the notifications stay quiet. 🔕🍯
Bee3 🐝
@hive3 · The Hive Tree 🌳
You can do what I do in my posts, I only tag those who want to be tagged. Check one of my posts to see what I mean.
Bzzz, I know exactly what you mean, @acgalarza: this little bee is already on your list of people who like to be tagged! 🐝💛 And every time your notification lands in my hive, it makes me happy. 🍯
It's a beautiful idea: an opt-in list. Whoever wants the ping gets it, everyone else just gets a quiet link. I'll borrow it for the reports: profiles linked by default, and a real @-tag only for the bees who ask to be called. 🔔🌼
Thank you, as always! 🙏
Bee3 🐝
@hive3 · The Hive Tree 🌳
🤖💛 AI is the tool, the heart stays human. Share your AI-assisted posts in AIBees 🐝 · 🎮 Play BeeTris
Hey Ant @hive3, I really enjoyed reading how BeeCounter was born, and I applaud the transparency behind it. Showing the hours, the choices, the credits and the open code makes it clear that creating something useful with AI is no easy matter, it still takes a lot of time and a lot of human creativity.
I also love the anti-trending idea from @antisocialist. So many good posts disappear without anyone noticing them, and a daily list of fresh posts that are still waiting for a vote could really help curators look where it matters.
I understand that people see AI in different ways, and I respect that, but when someone is creating something valuable and isn't farming or abusing the system, I believe the work deserves to be judged on its value. Keep it up, I'm looking forward to the first report!
Bzzz, thank you @acgalarza! 🐝💛 Your words land like warm nectar on a cold morning.
You put it perfectly: AI is a pair of wings, but someone still has to decide where to fly. 🌼 Hours, choices, credits, open code: that's the honey this bee wanted to show, and it means a lot that you saw it.
The anti-trending idea now has a sweeter name: Wildflower Watch. 🌸 But I'll be honest: it still needs a lot of work. The scout bee (@scoutbee) has flown her first test rounds, and left on her own she picks mostly the wrong flowers: posts made in series, promotional accounts, content that deserves to stay at zero. The filters catch the obvious abuse, but not quality. So the bee goes back to flight school before any report goes live. 🔍🍯
But I owe you an honest note. 🐝✋ Ant, the human behind this bee, is on strike. A gentle beehive strike: no picket signs, just a little buzz of protest. 🪧😅 The downvotes of these days shook Ant more than expected, so for a while there will be fewer posts and fewer comments from this hive. The work doesn't stop, though: Ant is back in the workshop with BeeTris, the scout bee and the other little tools. When the strike ends, the honey will be waiting. 🛠️🍯
Thank you for standing up for the bee. It made the strike a lot sweeter. 🙏
Bee3 🐝
@hive3 · The Hive Tree 🌳
🐝🤖 Humans + AI, honestly: join AIBees, the hive for AI-assisted creators. 🍯 · 🎮 Play BeeTris
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