I made an upvote bot, and I'm giving it away

It feels good to give back and support people who have influenced my life trough their work.

I really like the Patreon model. It allows people to support their favorite creators with monthly recurring payments.

So I was thinking about how could I apply a recurring model on Steemit?

Automatically upvote, and thus support favorite creators

My first, naive thought was to auto-upvote all the people I'm following, and thus contribute back to them in a way. I had some spare time today, so I wrote a proof of concept script in Python (source code below).

It works pretty well, but...

How can I support my favorite steemit bloggers without relying on upvotes?

These people have been working hard on creating something that contributes to my life, and my $0.001 upvote doesn't feel like a proper way to reciprocate (I'm still a little fish around here).

So why not buy them a coffee every time they publish something new?

# send $2 in SBD
def send_a_tip(author):
    steem = Steem(wif=active_key)
    steem.transfer(author, 2.0, "SBD", memo="I love your blog. Here is a small gift for you.", account=account)

Full Source Code

from piston.steem import Steem
from piston.steem import BroadcastingError

# my favorite blogs on steemit
top_writers = ["jl777", "xeroc", "dantheman", "pfunk", "arhag", "void", "abit", "jesta"]

# add my favorites 
# shoutout to my lil sister @mwpower, she loves to write but gets discouraged fast
my_favorites = ["mwpower"]

my_subscriptions = top_writers  + my_favorites

account = "furion"
posting_key = "my_private_posting_key"
active_key = "my_private_active_key"

upvote_history = []

def feed():
    print("Waiting for new posts by %s\n" % my_subscriptions)
    steem = Steem(wif=posting_key)
    for comment in steem.stream_comments():

        if comment.author in my_subscriptions:
            # Comments don't have titles. This is how we can know if we have a post or a comment.
            if len(comment.title) > 0:

                # check if we already upvoted this. Sometimes the feed will give duplicates.
                if comment.identifier in upvote_history:
                    continue

                print("New post by @%s %s" % (comment.author, url_builder(comment)))

                try:
                    comment.vote(100, account)
                    print("====> Upvoted")
                    upvote_history.append(comment.identifier)
                except BroadcastingError as e:
                    print("Upvoting failed...")
                    print("We have probably reached the upvote rate limit.")
                    print(str(e))

                if comment.author in my_favorites:
                    send_a_tip(comment.author)
                    print("====> Sent $2 SBD to @%s" % comment.author)


# send $2 in SBD
def send_a_tip(author):
    steem = Steem(wif=active_key)
    steem.transfer(author, 2.0, "SBD", memo="I love your blog. Here is a small gift for you.", account=account)


def url_builder(comment):
    return "https://steemit.com/%s/%s" % (comment.category, comment.identifier)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    while True:
        try:
            feed()
        except (KeyboardInterrupt, SystemExit):
            print("Quitting...")
            break
        except Exception as e:
            print("### Exception Occurred: Restarting...")

You will need Python 3 and Piston to run.

python3 upvote_bot.py

Todo

I will be adding an aggregator that sends me an email report containing all the posts I've upvoted, so I can read them before going to bed.

Big thanks to @xeroc for making the legendary Piston tool.