At your request I will say the same thing I did on reddit.
"Importantly, you cannot reduce the reputation of anyone with a higher reputation than you."
Wrong, wrong wrong wrong.
OK then. My steemit rep is 51. If I have identified you correctly on steemit as @justtryme90, your rep is 70. Are you telling me (purely hypothetically) that if I flagged you enough, your rep would drop? I know that low-SP accounts aren't going to have much impact anyway, both due to the SP involved, and the non-linear nature of the reputation score. But if it were the case that low-rep accounts could reduce the rep of higher-rep accounts, even if only incrementally, that would be a big deal, as well as contrary to a lot of what I've read. Is it that all the older posts on this, and official Steemit FAQ are out of date due to hardfork changes?
I am telling you that it would affect my reputation, would it drop the number? No because it takes a long time and a lot of votes to get it up there. However your flag would reduce my reputation score (you can view the real number on steemd). We're I to be flagged enough, by people with lower rep, my visible rep would in fact go down. Its not that someone with a lower rep can NOT affect someone with a higher reputation, its just that the effect that their vote has on the person with higher rep is small, relative to the reputation that person has.
Lets take an example, say an account with a lower rep-score but a LOT of SP, flags me. That would have a fairly significant impact on my reputation score. However it may take more than one flag to actually start dropping the number, even by a larger holder. Just for the same reason I described earlier, it took a whole LOT of votes to get it up there in the first place.
The official documents are not incorrect, you are just sort of mis-interpreting how the system works.
Thanks for responding - I appreciate it because this is something I really want to get to the bottom of. I had taken this part of the FAQ at face value:
I also read this post by @archange, which pointed me this page on github. I'm not an expert, but I think I captured the relevant bit of code in this screenshot:
I would happily accept that I'm missing something here - not least because this is something that I would love to be wrong about.
Based upon this it would appear that I am wrong and that you are correct. Those settings are idiotic and further solidify my opinion that reputation on steemit is stupid. So I can just go around flagging and killing peoples rep, and theres nothing anyone but a few people with rep higher then 70.5 can do to stop me?
Hence the nature of my concerns. Thanks for being so cool about his.
I am more depressed that I have been on this platform for as long as I have, and have fundamentally misunderstood the functioning a relatively high level aspect of it.
If you can't affect my "reputation" then reputation isnt a reputation at all. Its a bullshit number.
I've had my PhD for nearly 3 years, and have been teaching for nearly 10, and I'm still wrong about things on a pretty regular basis. Adjusting your views in light of new evidence, or a better understanding of existing evidence, does not require you beating yourself up about it.
I'm not. Being disappointed is a natural emotion, but it's fleeting. I am wrong about things daily, part of being a research scientist. ;)