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I was hoping to be able to celebrate both my reputation reaching 60 and having gained 1000 followers at the same time. But I seem to be 38 followers shy of 1000 and the number of my followers has been increasing so slowly in the past month or so that I think reaching 1000 will probably take another month or longer at best.
Out of those two, reaching a reputation of 60 is clearly more important as reputation is a straightforward consequence of getting upvoted (minus downvotes). For the details of how reputation is calculated, see this article by 
Hive account@arcange. Reputation as a function of upvotes (minus downvotes) is logarithmic which means that your reputation increases easily at first when you start out with a reputation of 25 and becomes gradually more difficult to attain when it grows. I started on Steem in February 2017 but did not write anything but my introductory post until early June 2017. It has essentially taken me a year to go from 25 to 60.
I have always upvoted my own posts like the most people here but never my own comments. Nor have I ever bought votes from bidbots or from any other larger account, which means that all upvotes I have received have been organic except for upvotes given by 
Hive account@suomibotti, a project of 
Hive account@apsu, that has been delegated SP by 
Hive account@acidyo (~ 5,000 SP), 
Hive account@gamer (~ 300 SP), 
Hive account@tarazkp (~ 350 SP) and Hive account@apsu (~ 150 SP). (Thank you Hive account@apsu and all delegators to it for this project to support the Finnish community for free!)
I owe special gratitude to 
Hive account@gamer00 who onboarded me in the spring of 2017. I'm also very grateful for his ~ 1,000 SP delegation that I have received from him. There is no question that he has been my most important supporter so far. Another important supporter has been Hive account@acidyo, the champion of manual curation, to whom I'm very thankful for appreciating many of those of my photography posts that I have taken some care to craft. I also want to extend my thanks to all the rest of those who have supported me during this journey!
