[pseudo0]

Some of this blandness may be by design, at least when it comes to political content. YouTube caught a lot of flak in 2018 for allegedly being a "radicalization pipeline", but research[0] shows that their "next video" recommendations consistently direct users away from fringe content and towards mainstream media outlets. One of the authors of that paper made a website to visualize their results[1], which is pretty neat.

The research in question was limited by not using logged-in accounts with a significant view history, but it's still the best attempt to quantify the YouTube algorithm's influence that I've seen so far. Mozilla's initiative sounds interesting, but the fact that they're asking users to only report negative interactions rather than getting a representative snapshot of all YouTube use makes me suspect that Mozilla is approaching this from the perspective of advocacy, not scientific inquiry.

--- [0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1912.11211.pdf [1] https://recfluence.net/