This is wrong. Think of all the companies that start on day 1 with 10,000s or millions of products. Hotels, restaurants, gigs, events, posts, people, other user

This is wrong. Think of all the companies that start on day 1 with 10,000s or millions of products. Hotels, restaurants, gigs, events, posts, people, other users, questions, articles, songs, etc. Manually picking stuff is time consuming and might become stale quickly while a basic recommendation engine will take you a day or two. The whole point is to simply expose your consumer to more of your other products in the hope that they engage with one. If you have a wide scope of products, presenting the same tiny number of manual picks would be insane. Editors picks only works if you have a tiny number of products. So build one if you want. And don't be afraid to make a slightly shit one either. As it's often better than tying up your time manually picking stuff out when you could be doing something better with your time.