If they just signed up they have no followings or subscriptions. So now what, you need to show accounts to follow first? Thats the same problem as deciding what the first video to show is. How do you decide who they should follow? Or the vision is that you can only have friends as if it's 2005 and you can't discover anything serendipitously?

I don't consume any content from my friends on something like tiktok where I'm interested in discovering people that have good content under topics I'm interested in. I don't know who those people are and I want to discover new ones that come up not just follow some already popular accounts.

>So now what, you need to show accounts to follow first

Youtube won't show you anything at all if you have a new account with watch history turned off. It says something like "turn on watch history and watch videos so we can recommend some for you".

Undoubtably the change needed here will introduce friction, will reduce viewing time, and society will be better off for it.

The whole idea here is to make content consumption more deliberate and mindful rather than just opening the app and veging out to an endless feed of slop.