Comment by PaulHoule

As a recommendations engineer I've never been that impressed with YouTube, I think they cribbed the YouTube interface from

http://www.sebastianmihai.com/idiocracy.html

and no wonder they write papers about "negative sampling" because they don't collect clean data. I made the mistake once of clicking on a video where a Chinese lady transforms into a fox on America's Got Talent and oh my god I am suddenly scheduled for thousands of AI slop videos where some Chinese girl transforms into something on that show with the same music and with the same reaction shots.

There is an answer to the coldest cold start problem and that is have a hand curated collection of about 100 or so content pieces that are of broad interest and stupendously high quality. Instagram will show you videos that are amazing (like somebody cooking a fine meal under rustic conditions) if you're cold and Stumbleupon did the same back in the day. Now Instagram 2025 and Stumbleupon 2012 are not "cold" from the viewpoint of content the way YT Shorts is, but Google has the money to pay professionals to make something -- but their ideology is against it.