Quote emcq's response above: > If you're thinking about the cold start problem when you dont have any information about a user, yes it's possible that your ove

Quote emcq's response above: > If you're thinking about the cold start problem when you dont have any information about a user, yes it's possible that your overall statistics is a combination of many subpopulations that doesn't really fit anyone very accurately but there are ways around this as well. I'd say a better approach (but may have user experience penalty) would don't even decide for the user, ASK. For example, take Flipboard / Quora as an example, you are asked to choose some topics to follow at the beginning. Assume research/data show 80% of the users are software engineers and 90% of them always pick "technology" as a topic they want to follow, would you rather show technology as one of the top five in the list of topics to choose? There's actually a lot of experiments you can do from a simple selection/survey process. I personally can't stand at going through pages to find something relevant, but I am also surprised to find things I never thought would be interesting to follow if I weren't present the options at all / or earlier.