Google does this all of the time with all of their products. The purposely degraded the performance of some users on their products (search IIRC) to see how they would react.
YouTube too, can't find it now but they did a study where they degraded users to 480p to see how many would manually switch back to HD (spoiler: very few did)
I believe YouTube also experimentally surfaces new recommendations slowly to see how many clicks they get and if it should be surfaced more or not
I believe YouTube also experimentally surfaces new recommendations slowly to see how many clicks they get and if it should be surfaced more or not