I think that the correct behavior in the long run is to give personalized recommendations, analogous to this proposal: https://sideways-view.com/2016/12/01/opti

I think that the correct behavior in the long run is to give personalized recommendations, analogous to this proposal: https://sideways-view.com/2016/12/01/optimizing-the-news-feed/ https://sideways-view.com/2016/12/01/optimizing-the-news-fee... The main motivation for having a unified view is to decide what to show people who visit but don't rate things / log in / etc. I'm currently finishing my dissertation on collaborative learning algorithms, and I agree that it is not generally possible to have a single global answer. This paper does something similar to your respect matrix: https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.1127 https://arxiv.org/abs/1411.1127 (The same technique can be modified to incorporate information from an external social network.)