Rep is mostly just an anti-spam sanity check for steemit.com. it makes it easy for the community to mute really spammy accounts.
And rep does affect rep, but in an exponential way that makes it basically impossible for a low-rep account to change the rep of a high-rep account.
Gotcha, thanks. So if I'm understanding this right, I can flag posts that I believe are just abusing bots to siphon big payouts off the system, and my 23 SP might reduce the payout a smidge. If a lot of people band together, we might even reduce the payout a lot. But if it is a high-rep account, that person could basically destroy my rep if they so chose and I couldn't do a thing, right?
What determines reputation score, anyway?
Yeah, that's about right. Flagging is unfortunately quite political.
I haven't worked out the exact formula for reputation, but it's essentially your account's reputation-weighted all-time cumulative author rewards. Every time you get an upvote, your rep goes up a tiny bit, and the amount it goes up is bigger if the voter has large rep and/or large SP. Same goes for downvotes.
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Interesting. Now I'm trying to figure out why I thought that's how it works. What's the actual zero-point? Steemit-displayed 25?
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Ok, that must be the ultimate source of my misunderstanding. I'll have to check the code more carefully in the future.
Thanks both of you, this is helpful. Maybe it just seems like high rep = high voting power because that person often also has a lot of SP. It's a pretty strong correlation.