Learning about your reputation on steemit: Magnificent help from @ilyastarar

You will learn much about steemit reputation through this post.

Reputation Score Starts at 25
When you joined steemit, you had a reputation score of 25. Same is the case of all Steemians. All new accounts are created with a reputation score of 25 and it is up to the user to increase or decrease it through his interaction with the blockchain and with other users.
It Increases Only with Upvotes
Upvotes you get on your content—posts and comments—are the only variable related to your reputation score. But there are some interesting limitations too. How that is done or calculated is shown as you read further.

Reputation score is not affected when:
You upvote others.
You receive author rewards in your wallet.
You earn curation rewards.
You publish a post or comment on a published post.
In short, only the upvotes you get will increase your reputation score. Nothing else!

Only Downvotes/Flags on Your Content Decrease Your Reputation Score
Only the flags (also called downvotes) can decrease your reputation score. Again, some protectionis enabled in the code to prevent abuse. How that is done or calculated will also be explained later as well.

Reputation & Account Value are NOT Related
There is no direct relationship—whatsoever—between your reputation score and the value of your Steemit account (as shown in the wallet). Which means that reputation score is independent of:-

The amount of Steem in a user's wallet.
The amount of Steem Power—owned or/and delegated—that a user has.
The amount of SBD in his wallet.
Since the Steemit wallet balance is not related to reputation score, it does not matter if you buy steem, power down, receive or send Steem/SBD to or from exchanges and send Steem or SBD to a fellow user. Your reputation score will remain unaffected.

Does Reputation Score Increase Uniformly?
Absolutely not! It is hard to go from 25 to 26, harder from 26 to 27, even harder to go to 28 from 27 and so on. There are two circulating theories about reputation score.

Why is Reputation Score Important?
As a one-liner, it shows other users how much you have contributed to the platform and how the community has welcomed you. If your reputation is below 25, it is self-evident that you are not doing anything good. If your reputation is 60, it means that you have put in a lot of effort and delivered a lot of value to receive many upvotes.

All thanks to @ilyastarar
I found this post so informative and decided to cut those points so my friend could see.