cliques

That is, rather than making recommendations/correlations for every user account, let users create their own named cliques.

These days mathematicians are divided into little cliques of perhaps a dozen people who work on the same stuff.

Interest sites like Reddit let people form into their own ignorant cliques without serious personal effort.

There's lots of cliques of people that hang around some product or community or service X.

Language was also a major barrier, or cliques that established for one reason or another.

For others its outrage about reporting on poor releases or cliques in gaming media.

They don't all learn the language, they don't know the culture, they form social cliques with other immigrants from the same country.

So informal high school cliques vs a Hierarchy - I can guess what the average outcome will be.

The categorization into geeks and non-geeks, while perhaps useful for identifying social cliques, is not at all useful for correcting society's power imbalances.

It seems like cliques like this should be pretty easy to statistically discover.

That being said, we had 2 distinct cliques of popular/smart kids, both of these groups were in honors/AP classes.

Over time people do move between cliques, but this social structure is ubiquitous.

There are articles on how Valve has "hidden management" cliques though [1].

(ISPs were usually in charge of "free" Usenet servers or commercial Usenet services were run by corporate entities, IRC is often setup and operated by small cliques of people).

Cliques form everywhere but they can be especially brutal in excluding remote workers from the 'core' teams that are seen as successful within a company.