Hi! So,
- the number is reputation. It will get bigger the more upvotes you get, and will go down only if someone with a high reputation gives you downvotes, (which are not common and usually takes several of them for the reputation to be affected) This usually just tells you how active and rewarded as an author a person has been (since an old account with low reputation is not an active author or has not been well rewarded). It's interesting if you see an account with negavite reputation to check if they have abused the blockchain somehow, usually plagiarizing content.