Studies show that YouTube does largely do this. The recommendations are usually proximal to the current video but they do generally trend toward the center. I w

Studies show that YouTube does largely do this. The recommendations are usually proximal to the current video but they do generally trend toward the center. I wrote my own YouTube crawler to test this empirically (or at least as empirically as I can, recommendations aren't exposed through an API and I had to use selenium). It is possible to go towards either extreme if one selectively chooses more and more left/right leaning videos, but a random traversal usually doesn't result in extreme content. It's generally difficult to gauge, because recommendations usually fall into what I call "topic pits" where once you view a few videos in a topic all subsequent recommendations will be in that topic. So my crawler would often fall into viewing a bunch of videos about gardening or math or something that is totally not political. By the point is, I never saw any trend of my crawler going down the "rabbit hole" that allegedly exists. The problem I see is that people's preexisting polarization means that they see a trend of centrist content as radicalizing. So you end up with liberals seeing centrist recommendations as pushing people to the right wing, and conservatives see a push to the center as restricting conservative content