Anyone can increase rep, even your own votes. It's all purely Steem Power-based. The more Steem Power and weight behind a vote, the more your rep goes up.
Flags are exactly the same way, but there is a gate check if you have more rep, you're allowed to follow the rules above, otherwise no change.
So that basically makes the highest rep person untouchable, until someone else managed to catch up, which takes a considerable amount of rep collecting at that point.
Though I think in this case, bad word of mouth rep does a lot too. But heck, as long as you have a rich backer (or extra account) supporting you, your Steemit rep doesn't matter much anyway.
Rep is virtually meaningless but sets the stage for outside viewing in.
I am not understand.
Reputation is changed only by upvotes and downvotes. The bigger they are, the more they affect the reputation. @Haejin has over one million SP to use for himself, so only a person with more SP than that can affect his reputation, which means that nobody can do that.
read above, you should have... if you flag someone with more rep you don't affect it.
I really believe that you are misunderstanding this. Steem Power is the one which influences reputation through votes, up or down. If somebody with low reputation but a lot of stake, like @berniesanders used to have, flags me, then my reputation will get lower. At least this is how I underatand, and I am almost sure that this is the way reputation work right now. Although, I may be wrong :)
I don't question your beliefs, it's a math formula, it doesn't either, lower rep can't affect higher rep, period, fork the code, you are right about the SP, although that would only scratch rewards to 0 if the rep is lower than the author
Cheers :)
Okay, this is interesting as I was not aware of this. Is there any reaource on this, where I can actually see this. You said look above,but I don't know exactly where...
it's stated in the whitepaper, somewhere
I meant this
by @playfulfoodie
That pretty much covers it :)