Is bidding on upvotes worthwhile?

• In the majority of cases, the answer is "no"; Under the best circumstances, you end up spending more than you earn back.
• The rewards indicated on steemvoter are estimates and subject to lots of change at the very last moments. Furthermore, those estimates do not account for any special terms the person offering the upvotes may apply, such as "X percent of your bid will be applied to X or Y, not to the total value of this round of voting."
• Your reputation score may get a slight boost. However, the value of that boost is hard to quantify.
• To get the best deals, you have to spend a lot of time on steemvoter.com watching and bidding on only the best deals at the last minute.

Here are my takeaways:

• Time is your most precious commodity: You're better off creating valuable content and building a real audience than lurking around steemvoter for hours to bid on a few votes.
• If you have a gambling addiction, avoid this activity at all costs. I don't have this problem, but I know people who do and I've seen them get sucked into losing a lot of money this way.
• It is easy to get suckered into believing you have to bid for upvotes to get ahead on steemit, but don't fall for it.

As a result of these experiences, I decided to review the content of every person who follows me and add them to a list of people who automatically receive my upvote every time they post (I'm using a premium account on steemvoter to do that). I review their posts regularly in my feed and remove people whose posts contain low-quality plagiarized or otherwise disappointing content.

For newcomers without a lot of steem, steem dollars, or steempower, just do this process manually. Spend a significant amount of time reading, following or muting other peoples work. Leave lots meaningful of comments. Upvote other peoples work. Ultimately this site is about creating a personal relationship with the community. People who try to cheat the system ultimately cheat themselves.