Reading the Ground: Signals and Cold Starts

Podcast: Clown Cast · Joey Musselman

Opublikowano: 2026-10-15

Recommender systems work like animal trackers—reading your behavior to guess what you want next. But a click is the noisiest signal; six clicks on a rival's drama doesn't mean betrayal. In this episode (part 5 of our recommender series), we explore the signals that feed user models, why dwell time matters more than clicks, what silence reveals, and the cold start problem that haunts every new user. 00:01:42 - Clicks: the cheap, noisy signal 00:06:30 - Dwell time: why staying matters 00:08:01 - Negative signals: mutes, hides, and what they mean 00:13:03 - Cold start: learning from nothing --- Sources & further reading: • Yifan Hu, Yehu...