What I mean by that term is: I´ve seen some great authors that post regularly and have great content "get stuck" between 200-400 followers and not getting a lot of rewards. Every time I see a post I really like I go into the authors blog (I navigate a lot the tags travel, photography, nature, spanish and life). I enjoy, when I have the time, to read some posts from the author but I also get into the comment section of the blog.

Sometimes this authors have only been here for a month and sometimes they´ve been here for almost a year. For those who I noticed they´ve been for a long time i´ve seen one common denominator (and again, this is only based on the sample I´ve seen, I am no expert and this is my opinion which can be wrong and if with arguments you make me see my mistake I am always up for a good sicussion): They post good content and they reply to comments on their content but I´ve seen so few comments in other people´s content.

So to answer both of your q´s. The bubble one and the correlation of success in writing with no voting for your own content:

The moment you stop autovoting you find yourself with a lot more SP than when you were spending 10 or 15% of your total SP (bearing in mind that you have around 20% daily to always have 100% the next day)... That means you have more SP to spend on other people. If you are a minnow like me, that means you have like $5 more to vote everyday on other people´s content.

With that in mind, you navigate your feed and your favorite tags to find good content and actually read the content in order to see if you vote for it or not. When you read more content you comment more and engage more. By engaging more you gain more visibility, that people that you voted for and commented in a meaningful way might see your blog and if they like it, they may follow you. That means more visibility again. So when you post quality content you have an exponencial growth because you have more viewers and potentialy more resteems and more votes.

So yes, in my humble experience, saving your SP to vote for other people´s content, gives you more SP to interact with other people and gaining more potential upvotes, more followers, more visibility and you become a "regular" in other user´s content. And then, you break the invisible bubble I´ve seen some people stucked in, the 200-400 follower and 10-20 reward posts...

For me it started when I wrote a piece about "why you should follow and upvote small accounts" about a month ago. Thinking about that subject before writing it, it changed my mentality and decided to engage more with other fellow minnows in a meaningful way. It gave me like 450 followers and my posts went from 5 SBD to 20-25 in a matter of maybe 3-4 weeks. Just that mentality change.

Again, this worked for me and I wanted to share my experience, it doesn´t mean it is a rule for succes or to live by and it may not be the same for other people. But I can sincerely say I do believe it is one way to grow, and of course I don´t consider myself big deal or an example of success here, but i do think I am doing good with these 3 things: Trying to make good content, giving rewards where rewards are due and engaging as much as possible, not only with replies to my content but also replying in a meaningful and helpful way in other content.

Thanks for asking me those questions, I don´t know if I expressed correctly but at least you made me put into words what I didn´t include in the post.

By reading your comments I can assume that you are an investor with some serious money and obviously we might think differently because I have no investment here, my SP is no big deal and It didn´t "cost" me anything so I can relate to your last comment, the onse about being paid for that investment and time... I totally understand your point of view and is as respectable as any other, primarily because we come from different neighbourhoods. You could say i am from the gheto trying to make my way into corporate, and you are an investor in that same company, so obviously our way of thinking about Steemit can have some common ground but I am seeing it from the stairs, you are seeing it from your office with a view :D Of course we might disagree in some points but the important thing is as you said, we are in this together, or we perish together.