REPUTATION: How to gain Rep Levels, Increasing difficulty, what to avoid.

The Steemit.com website has a wonderful frequently asked section, that can answer most any question that almost any steemit user has. There is a section on reputation and how it works on Steemit. What is reputation?

There are 5 sections here. We quickly find out that reputation on Steemit is just a mechanism that was intended to be used to help prevent spam and help show how a user's contributions to the Steem blockchain have faired, via total upvotes or downvotes an Steemit account has received. The higher or lower an account's reputation is, in relation to your account, will be the determining factor in how an upvote or downvote will affect your reputation level. Once your reputation is a 'negative' number your posts will no longer have visible pictures you can attach and your posts will be 'greyed' out making it less visible and more inconvenient to read.

Reputation levels are based on a 'log10' system. What is a log10 system? Best to send you to a Quoda link that explains logarithms. Essentially someone with a reputation of 40 will have a 10x higher reputation than someone with a reputation of 30. With that math applied, we can see it will be 20x harder to go from a 30 reputation to a 50 reputation than from a 30 reputation to 40 reputation, depending on who is upvoting us and at what reputation level they are at.

Reputation ranking is strictly associated with upvotes and downvotes. Probably best to not even casually say negative things or act like a bully if you don't have community/whale support or you are one, to upvote any flags you may receive in retaliation, even then it's best not to flag to avoid retaliation via flags that will lower your reputation ranking or upvotes that can undo your flags.

@steemit intended on reputation levels to have more of a role in determining who was and wasn't spam. This has not been the result, unfortunately, and it has become more of a, in my opinion, lazy/cost effective way to have users self-police steemit instead of hiring people to actually censor malicious malware/spyware and spam that floods the blockchain onto https://steemit.com. Reputation levels can mean anything anymore outside of spam or plagiarism, like having a whale/community, not like you, a single person paying a flag service to flag you or you were never taught about how Steemit works properly and you were simply reposting your content from other sites. So its difficult to fully understand someone's reputation level anymore without fully investigating their account.