Hello Steemians!

Welcome to another edition of #steemacademy, where I share tips, tricks and help educate Steemians. Today I will be talking about the reputation score on Steemit - what is it, why does it matter and how can we ensure it keeps increasing.

What is your reputation score?

If you look on someone's profile on Steemit you will see their reputation score in brackets next to their blog name. So if you see my page you will see ‘the alternative blog (48)’, so my reputation score is 48. All new users start with a reputation score of 25.

At the most basic level your reputation score shows the amount of value you have bought to Steemit through posting content and comments - a higher reputation score in theory means you have added more value to the Steemit platform.

When someone upvotes your content, your reputation score increases. Conversely, when someone downvotes/flags your content and they have a higher reputation score than you this can negatively affect your reputation.

We won't go into the mathematics of how the reputation score is calculated here, but it is good to know that early on it is easier to increase your reputation score, but it becomes harder to increase the higher it gets.

Why does your reputation score matter?

As I mentioned above, your reputation score shows how much value you have added to Steemit - therefore people are more likely to ‘trust’ that you have good content if you have a higher reputation score.

Obviously everyone starts of with a reputation of 25, but in my experience it didn't take long to increase this to about 40. When I see people's posts with a reputation score around 25, I can generally assume they are new to Steemit and am unsure of the quality of their posts.

The reputation score also helps Steemians to ‘weed out’ spam or non valuable content. Because flagging leads to a lower reputation score it means that the users ‘police’ the content on Steemit.

If people are constantly posting spam, or plagiarised content on here they will usually get flagged. I know that when I see posts by people with a reputation score below 25 I generally don't even look at their content.

How to ensure your reputation score keeps increasing

Consistently posting valuable content is the way to increase your reputation score - not only your posts, but also comments on other people's posts. The way it works is that getting upvotes from people with a higher reputation score than you will have a bigger impact than getting upvotes from people with lower reputation scores.

I believe leaving quality, thought provoking, relevant and interesting comments is a really underrated way to increase not only your reputation score but also your following.

Obviously the things you want to avoid are:

• Plagiarised or unoriginal content - this is a sure way to get flagged and will quickly decrease your reputation score.
• Spam - this is things like leaving comments like ‘nice post’ or ‘great’ (some Steemians hate this and will flag you as it doesn't add any value). Another example of spam that could get you flagged is posting links to your blog in the comments and asking ‘upvote got upvote’
• Scams- this should go without saying but there are more and more phissing scams out there there are now bots who look out for scams and automatically flag them.

Are bots threatening the legitimacy of the reputation score?

Because upvote bots can be used to purchase upvotes - as a way to make your post more visible, an argument could be made that they are making the reputation score less relevant. What could happen - and is happening to a certain degree is that people buy upvotes and their reputation score goes up as a result, no matter what the content is.

At the moment there seems to be no remedy for this but it is something to be wary of - a higher reputation score doesn't necessarily mean good content. I have nothing against people using upvote bots on here to boost the visibility of their post - providing it is quality and not just something thrown together in 5 minutes!

I think in the future there needs to be some type of control over the use of upvote bots, or we will see artificially inflated rewards and reputation scores.

Conclusion

On steemit every user starts with a reputation score of 25 which increases as they add value to the platform (or decreases if they get flagged). Increasing your reputation score is important as in theory it shows that you have added value to Steemit.

Thanks for reading - I'd love to hear feedback or any questions you may have...