Back when I browsed TV Tropes regularly, my algorithm for using it to find media that I liked centered around skimming a lot of media pages that looked vaguely interesting and using them to get a better idea of themes and target audience, while throwing out anything that was full of creepy fanservice tropes or obviously written by a single very enthusiastic viewer. When I tried mining it for actual recommendations, they were usually bad.

LW doesn't have anything that lends itself to that sort of exploratory search, but recommendations from the media threads have been somewhat reliable for me, probably thanks to a closer demographic match. Better coverage in certain topic areas, too: we seem to have a greater proportion of literary SF readers posting here, for example.