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@Triple_R Shipping wars and cliques are my area of expertise. Do you want my version or the mod version?
-The mod version is that shipping wars end up in flames and trolls, and tend to spread out all over the place, so just killing them outright in all threads is easier and efficient. Of course, that didn't use to be so. There were pretty successful and persistent shipping wars going around (especially when you have communities within communities pop up), but those had mostly just died out by the time they decided against all forms of active campaigning, in all and any threads and boards. It made things easier to manage and supervise. Fairly recently, Social Groups appeared. Pretty much the same thing as before, although apparently it's easier to contain the flames.
As far as the rep goes, Social Groups do give you the resources to guide reputation even now however you like, but that was always against the rules anyway. Note, however, that when community leaders generally expressed distaste against a poster, you could be sure he'd be stamped for negrepping by the group, as long as no rules were actively broken. Enemy groups don't need more reason to go against each other anyway.
Clique repping was just a lesser symptom of group politics. I'm not sure how exaggerated the reports are but some form of underground group repping WAS there. For example, you can be fairly sure that the worst members of each group would end up getting negreps primarily from the opposite group and the group members would posrep each other often. Thing is, these worst posters from any group were indeed bad posters and ended up getting banned, so the negrep wasn't really unjustified. I seriously doubt that you have even stuff like that now.
-My version is, of course, more romantic.
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