Reputation

General

Experience, Reputation, and Achievements are part of the interaction and reward systems on Royal Road. These serve to encourage users to participate and collect rewards by performing tasks. These tasks have a wide range, from logging in every day to reaching the top of best rated to reporting bugs. The automated rewards are in the form of experience and achievements while reputation is reserved for user-to-user interaction.
You can also find those with the highest EXP and reputation on the member list https://www.royalroad.com/user/memberlist 

Reputation

Reputation is based on user interaction and rewards based on what others think about your posts on either the forums or fiction chapters. Reputation can be given, and earned, using the button to give reputation. On the forums it is located as follows:

And in the comment section is right about here:

After clicking this button the following screen will appear. Here you can select the amount of reputation given and the attached comment. Limits on reputation given differ per user. This is explained in a moment.

Note that the information on who you gave reputation to and the message included is public information. It can be found in the profile page in the Reputation tab. 

There are some additional limitations to giving out reputation as well.

• You can give reputation up to 20 times a day, or if your reputation level is over 20, then up to an amount of times a day equal to your reputation level.
• You can only give reputation once to any individual comment or post.
  
• You can only give reputation to the same user a maximum of two times per day.
  
• Authors can give comments on their fiction 5 reputations by default, and 10 if they have over 5000 reputation points
• Authors cannot receive reputation in their own fiction comment section.
  

Awards

The amount of reputation a user can give is not static and is tied to the accumulated reputation of a user. In easier terms: the higher your reputation is, the more reputation you are able to give out, this is the first reward. The limit increases are as follows

Apart from the ability to give out more reputation, there are also cosmetic rewards. If you have visited the forums or comment sections you have seen the border around the profile pictures of some users, and the accompanying gemstone in the bottom center of said border. Where the border is the reward for experience points, the gem is rewarded for accumulating reputation. Below are some of the gems to be obtained.

Every level, the gem quality improves, starting at almost hidden to being a nicely cut pentagon. Every 5 levels, the gem quality resets but you unlock the next color. These colors range from a dull gray to multicolor excellence. The last gem is unlocked at level 50, which would require 15190 reputation points.