Haha, yes, I did the 'I upvote every comment thing' for a while too! Until I learned like @scottshots mentioned above that they turned into dust! I only used the upvotes as a visibility mechanism and so spammy comments did get lower on my comment list, but when I heard it was wasted VP I stopped. (Since I now have to use about 20% upvote for a 0.03$ upvote due to outstanding delegations...)
Anyway. There's this thing called 'Dustsweeper': https://steemit.com/contest/@soyrosa/a-project-every-newbie-should-know-about-dustsweeper - You give the project an SBD and it will automatically upvote 'dust' to 3 cents! Wh00h00!
From the maker I learned through my comments the following:
you get paid if it is $0.02 or higher... but when you look at your post or comment, you don't know if it is: ($0.015 to 0.019) or (2.0 to 0.024)... you will get paid on the 2.0 and above, but you won't get paid on the 0.019 and below (even if it shows 0.02)
The system rounds and that's the threshold $0.019 and lower turns into dust
Dustsweeper can now also be used to not only upvote your own payouts, but those of others too! You can give a fellow person a small amount of SBD so their payouts go above the dust treshold too: https://steemit.com/contest/@dustsweeper/dustsweeper-s-refer-a-friend-and-nominate-a-newbie-game
CC to @scottshots @themonkeyzuelans who were involved in the discussion above. Good luck with sweeping dust guys! :D
Thank you for the detailed explanation @soyrosa!