Thing I thought of saying in a Discord discussion but decided not to post:
I worked at a company that presented algorithmic lists, user-created, and in-house editorial lists. The user-created ones were good enough to train the models that powered the algorithmic lists. But product directors made sure that those were never on the shelves in the home view or the top of search results because they wanted to retain the power to direct the users to certain content. The editorial lists were subject to executive direction and were otherwise metrics-driven, so that’s how control was maintained there.
People in my division wanted to surface content from less popular artists, so we had to do it by creating algorithmic lists for them, so they could make it to the shelves. We had to use our a lot of our own time to show that it could be done, and it happened to catch the interest of a product manager that was having trouble filling out non-western countries’ shelves (the company had way more data on western countries consumption habits) so we got to ship it. It was a lot of work to get around a limitation that made things worse for users and artists.