When deciding to downvote:
What causes my reputation score to go down?
The only way for your reputation score to go down is to be downvoted by another user. Not all downvotes will cause a reputation loss though.
- Downvotes from users with a lower reputation score than you will not hurt your score.
- If your post or comment that was downvoted still received more upvotes than downvotes (weighted by SP), then the net effect on your reputation score will still be positive.
For all the very new users you need to read the FAQ page very carefully. I am not sure but along with reputation if a person has more SP (SteemPower) than you your vote does nothing to them. Down voting does not work when trying to downvote someone with a larger Rep, or a larger pool of SteemPower.
There really is no way a person with less than 1500SP is going to have any effect on him. He is making more money on creating these little bits of Drama than he has on anything else he has created. Look at the effect monetarily it has had on @haejin, you will see not much.
Don't buy into the bull that he is doing this to protect the Reward pool, if he was doing that he would choose to opt out of collecting the rewards for his post.
What it is saying about SP, is that if the total upvotes, weighted by SP, are higher than the downvotes, also weighted by SP, then the reputation won't go down. It has nothing to do with your own SP. Basically if there's more SP behind the upvotes on your post/comment than there is SP behind the flags, then your reputation won't move.
Thank you for the simple explanation, I have been trying to wrap my head around the wording and now I think I understand. If only he downvotes and his SP is 1500, and then I upvote myself to do away with his downvote and my SP is 1505, then he did nothing but waste a downvote on me? Do I have that right? only those two votes on a post. Just an example. But that would explain how a few people negated his down vote on me 3+ months ago.
No worries :) Yeah, basically, since you have more SP, your reputation would not be affected. However, he would effectively be canceling out most of your SP with his flag, so while your upvote will keep you from losing reputation, you won't get hardly any monetary value out of it (1505 SP - 1500 SP = effectively a 5 SP upvote), or at least that's the theory. I may be off on the money bit, but I'm confident in the reputation part.