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Your up to reputation 40 already! WOW! I predict by next week you'll be up to reputation 55 :))

haha Hopefully. But in what ways does higher reputation matter?

Your Steemit reputation is entirely determined by the amount of upvotes you receive from your peers here on the site. You will get positive reputation points for upvotes on your content and comments and get dinged negative reputation points when a user of higher reputation flags your content/comments. As for the end goal we are aiming to build up our reputation to 100 so we can help secure the STEEM network against plagiarist and abusive users.

But it can also be misused by higher reputation users who go rogue haha

Steem Power can be abused, but not reputation - your safe my Asian friend ;)

But didn't you say higher reputation users can flag content? So, that would bring down your reputation. Just hypothesizing haha

Whales with high Steem Power can down-vote your content $ awards but not your reputation. At moment the whalesl all agreed to not down-vote anyone, so please post as much as you can to make some $'s whilst the Steem price is high :)