Hey Hive! 👋
You know how it goes. You're scrolling through Hive, reading posts, leaving comments, and occasionally you want to give someone a little extra appreciation. So you type !INDEED, !MMB, !HOPE, or whichever tipping bot you happen to use.
Nothing wrong with that, of course. It works perfectly fine, and has been doing so for quite some time.
But sometimes, wouldn't it be easier to just leave a 👍, a 🤝, or perhaps a 💯?
Well, thanks to a suggestion from @savvyplayer, that's now possible!
All of our tipping bots now support emoji tipping!
And yes, I know, technically we're saving only a few keystrokes here. But considering how many tips some of us hand out every day, those little things do add up. Besides, I rather like the idea of making tipping feel a bit more natural.
So, how does it work?
Pretty simple, actually.
First, you need to tell the bot that you want to use emojis. You only have to do this once per bot, and you can do it by replying anywhere with something like:
!INDEED emoji on
That's it!
The bot will confirm your choice through a small memo in your Hive wallet. No unnecessary reply comment cluttering up the blockchain conversation (we already have enough of those, don't we? Don't we???).
From that moment on, whenever you use 💯 or 👍 in a comment, 
!INDEED.
And this works everywhere. PeakD, Ecency, Hive.blog or whatever frontend you prefer.
Changed your mind? Just type:
!INDEED emoji off
And everything goes back to normal.
Of course, all the existing tipping rules still apply. Eligibility requirements, daily limits, cooldowns, everything stays exactly as it was. We're changing how you trigger a tip, not how the tipping system works.
But why do I need to enable it first?
Good question. And there's a pretty good reason for that.
Imagine enabling emoji tipping automatically for everyone on Hive.
Someone writes a nice post, you reply with "Great work! 👍", and suddenly you've sent a tip. Then someone else shares something interesting, you leave a 🙏, and there goes another one.
Before you know it, you've used up your daily tipping allowance without even realising you were tipping anyone.
Which would be... well, not exactly ideal. 😁
That's why emoji tipping is strictly opt-in.
You decide which bots can interpret your emojis as tips. Nobody else, and certainly not the bots themselves.
Which emojis can you use?
We now have 11 bots supporting emoji tips, each with its own little collection of symbols.
| Bot | Command | Emoji | Token |
|---|---|---|---|
 @mmbbot | !MMB | 🤝 | MMB |
| @indeedly | !INDEED | 💯 👍 | IDD |
 @hopelizer | !HOPE | 🌈 🙏 | HOP |
 @thestrider | !STRIDE | 👟 🏃 🚶 🚴 | STR |
 @weirdly | !WEIRD | 👽 🤔 😕 🫤 😵💫 | WRD |
 @zombiebot | !ZOMBIE | 🧟 | BRN |
 @youarealive | !ALIVE | 🌱 | ALIVE |
 @bbhbot | !BBH | 🪙 ₿ | BBH |
 @hohbot | !HEARTBEAT | 🫀 | HEARTBEAT |
Most of these are pretty self-explanatory, I think.
BBH, for example, stands for Bitcoin Backed Hive, so a coin 🪙 seemed appropriate. Or even the Bitcoin symbol ₿, for those of you who happen to have that one readily available on your keyboard.
A lot of these emoji choices actually came from 
A few other things worth knowing.
Skin tones and gender variants work too. So 👍🏽 works just like 👍, and 🏃♀️ works just like 🏃.
And if a bot supports multiple emojis, using several of them in the same comment won't suddenly multiply your tips. One bot, one tip per comment, regardless of how many matching emojis you throw at it.
Sorry, no unlimited tipping by filling your comment with a hundred frogs. 🐸
And because apparently I can't stop building tools...
If you're already using my Reply & Tip tool, things get even easier.
I've integrated the emoji settings there as well.
Just open Settings → Emoji tips, and you can enable or disable emoji tipping for individual bots, or switch them all on or off at once.
One signature, stored on-chain, and you're done. Nothing gets posted to your feed.
Once enabled, the tipping chips in Reply & Tip will show the corresponding emojis, and when you send a reply, the tool can automatically use those emojis instead of the usual !commands.
And because I know some people prefer their good old commands (I'm not judging, I still like a proper keyboard myself), you can disable that last part and keep using commands in your replies.
The choice is yours.
Want to see which bots you've enabled?
I've also updated tipping.botlord.eu.
Each bot now shows its emoji, along with the number of people who have enabled emoji tipping for that particular bot.
And under My tips, you can see exactly which bots have emoji tipping enabled for your account.
Nothing revolutionary, but rather useful if you've enabled a few bots and, three weeks later, can't remember which ones.
Not that this ever happens to me, of course. 😇
And no, we're not the only ones!
Emoji tipping isn't something exclusive to the botlord family.
There are other tipping bots on Hive that support emojis as well, and I rather like seeing these little improvements spread across the ecosystem.
So if you're using other bots, have a look at what they support. You might discover a few more shortcuts.
For me, that's one of the nice things about Hive. People come up with ideas, someone builds something, others improve on it, and gradually the whole ecosystem becomes a little easier to use.
No grand revolution required. Sometimes a simple 🤝 is enough.
Anyway, give it a try, and let me know what you think!
And if you have suggestions for other emojis, or think one of the current choices is completely ridiculous (looking at you, weirdly 👽), drop them in the comments.
I'm always happy to hear ideas, especially the ones that save us a bit of unnecessary work.
See you around the blockchain!
All these tipping bots are operated by the @botlord witness. If you enjoy using them and would like to support the infrastructure behind them, you can vote for @botlord as a witness. It helps keep the bots running, the servers busy, and me finding new excuses to spend my evenings writing code instead of doing... well, whatever, just try to keep me busy here! 😁
🔧 I build things on Hive...
Apparently I have a slight problem with leaving things alone when I think they could work better, so over time that turned into quite a collection of free Hive tools.
Account stats, tipping, earnings, governance, witness tools and several other things I probably built because I needed them myself first.
Everything is free to use, and I'm still adding things. Because apparently having hobbies wasn't enough.
🤖 ...and I run a witness too
A lot of those tools, bots and other experiments exist because I'm still very much invested in building on Hive, including the boring infrastructure underneath it all.
If you think that deserves a witness vote:
👉 Vote for @botlord
But these are also backed by me!
👉 Vote for @nathalie-s
👉 Vote for @aliveandmmb
👉 Vote for @bradleyarrow
And while you're there, it never hurts to check whether the rest of your witness votes are still going to active witnesses. Ghosts are notoriously bad at producing blocks.
💥 Tip someone, make their day slightly better
I also run a growing family of tipping bots, including !INDEED, !HOPE, !WEIRD and a few other creatures that escaped from the server room.
You can check their status, availability and more here:
📸 About the images: unless stated otherwise, the photos in my posts are my own. AI-generated images are created by me using my own prompts.
🔗 More of me around the internet: Borniet On Hive
See you around the blockchain.