How does reputation work in Hive? Answering in Quora.

Reputation is a way to indicate the trustworthiness of an author in the Hive community. It is basically a function of two factors:-

the reputation of the voter
the reward shares(rshares) of the voter

The raw reputation of any author in Hive Blockchain is the net aggregated sum of rshares received at any given point of time. The rshares is a function of the reward pool, HP can influence the reward pool and as the influence is governed by the HP(Hive Power), the rshares is ultimately dependent on the HP of the voter.

The raw reputation is then simplified using a logarithmic function and with a mathematical formula so that the long complex raw reputation which is not easily readable by humans can be brought in to simplified form for human use.

So in the front end what you see is the simplified reputation score(two-digit)and the Blockchain always reads the raw reputation score(millions, billions, or maybe trillions) of a user.

Whether the reputation of a voter can affect the reputation of an author or not, is very well explained in this illustration.

So if a voter is having a lot of HP and if he is upvoting your content with higher weight, then it can have a significant impact on your reputation score and can really boost your reputation score. Similarly, it can adversely impact your reputation score to the downside if it downvotes(but his rep score has to be more than your rep score in this case).

Your reputation score is independent of your own HP, rather it is dependent on the reputation score of the voter and HP of the voter, upvote/downvote weight.

The default reputation score is always 25 from where the author starts his journey. Depending upon the upvotes or downvotes it receives, the reputation increases or decreases (subject to the reputation score of the voter and rshares as explained above).

Every successive increment of the reputation score becomes difficult than the previous score.

Source

So as evident from the graph, you can quickly and easily reach a rep score of 50, but from 50-60 it is harder, from 60-onwards it is hardest.

Mathematical computation

The raw reputation score you can check from Hiveblocks.com/@username. Replace "username" with a valid Hive username and then scroll down to see the raw rep score at the left.