See – here's the thing.

The bid bots are not a pay-for-effect kind of thing. The bid bots which drive up votes are effectively small betting pools where you stake some amount of money against the chance that you will be staking the most money for the largest chunk of the pool. Say, if the bot controls a $10 up vote (for the sake of discussion), if you give it $1 and no one else throws into the pool, you make a profit of $9 across the board. If you and someone else each give it $1, it gives you 50% of the vote and the other person 50% of the vote, and you've made a profit of $4 across the board. If you and two other people each give it $1, $10 is split between you and you've made a profit of $2.33.

But this is an optimistic line of approach. You never know how much somebody else is going to drop on the bid.

If you gave the same bot a $5 bid, contend with the idea that you might make a $5 profit across the board, and someone else comes in with a $1 bid, things start looking ugly real fast. You get a vote for 5/6 of that $10, or a $3.33 profit. When other people come in, your cut gets smaller, and you become more and more likely to actually take a loss on any bid buying.

Or, more succinctly – it's gambling.

If we are specifically and only talking about bots which promise to re-steem your post, you have to ask yourself "who are the people who are actually likely to see or follow a bot that re-steems people for money?" Is it people who care about quality content? Anybody can pay the bot to re-steem them. Is it people who care about what you produce? Obviously not; the bot didn't in the first place. So what you actually paying for?

If my study of the blockchain is any reflection, what you're paying for is a bunch of minimally active/inactive bot-created accounts which don't actually do anything except follow this one other account and allow it to claim that it has "a really big number of followers." And every three dollars that the bot makes in profit, it can make another fake, inactive, useless account that it can re-steem your post to.

If you care about getting valuable time and effort out of the time and effort you put into making posts, you avoid bots. Aggressively. You spend the time and money that you would invest writing the bot train and go out and find people who are interested in the same things that you are, comment on their posts, engage with them as people, and then write for that audience.

Sure, you could do something else – but why would you?