Hi @n4t4h, there's not really any difference, but I'm using the word to make the difference between old and new minnows. I know not all the new members get these breaks. There are honestly way too many, so many will be lost in the big influx of posts. I was simplifying the facts for the point I was trying to get across.
You're not doing anything wrong, you're noticing the same problems many do, which is basically that it's hard to be seen in the big amount of new posts coming out every minute. If you're new, your best bet is to comment a lot on other people's posts while maintaining a couple of your own aswell.
With "meaningful followers", I basically mean the second one. Followers who care about the topics you write about and therefor are more likely to upvote your posts or comment on them. They could also simply be nice people you have nice conversations with. I like both kinds of those followers :-)
I see how the percentages bit can be confusing for a new member! It's because you don't have the option yet. Neither did I at the beginning. When you upvote, you click the icon once and that's it. You upvoted the content. At a certain point though, when your Steem Power is high enough, you'll get a voting percentage slider. You click the upvote icon, which is when you get the slider. You can then adjust it to lower the weight of your vote, before you click the item again to cast your vote.
This slider is very much needed lately, because your voting power drains a lot faster. That's why it's hard for new members to keep up their voting power, because they aren't able to lower their weight and therefor aren't able to have much sway over their voting power drainage.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions. Even though I haven't earned much upvotes and rewards yet, I am enjoying just sharing and posting.
It's not a problem. As long as you're enjoying spending your time here, you'll be fine. The people who do it only for the rewards will get sick of this quite quickly, because normally you need to spend a lot of time to build up your following. Some don't seem to lately though, but yeah. I already got into that :D