Alyosha2001 I can state with certainty we have more than 100 users on this forum. But that's not entirely important here.
Attempting to persuade companies using the raw power of metrics by petition without further evidence and research will get you delayed solutions in the best scenario and actively sabotage progress at worse. I don't think we have the best scenario either. An example for the naysayers who say this is a "niche" problem that doesn't matter and absolutely no one else outside of here cares is the iPhone X (and successors) were released with OLED displays that have awful 240Hz PWM, and given all the discussion about it in other communities it certainly is getting a lot of attention for such a "niche" issue. Perhaps the most attention for an individual series of devices. Unfortunately given the supposed difficulties of "properly" implementing OLED displays in mobile devices don't think issues with newer iPhones have been entirely solved but positive awareness is the first step.
To say companies don't care about "this issue" and giving up all hope of technical progress is also a disservice to the cause. I think expecting existing products to work for everyone is a impossible ask, however it's important to remember over the years there has been changes in display and graphics technology, some for the worse and others for the better. First comes to mind are the crude LED backlights that had horrible PWM (part of which started the infamous Apple "eyestrain thread"). That was attempted to be solved with alternate means of dimming technology by various companies around the midst of last decade (granted some implementations were better than others and I think differentiating between them is still an open research question), but at this point desktop monitors without awful PWM (and possibly alleged voltage fluctuations) do exist. So in the case of desktop monitors that's closer to being solved at this point.
Second of all in the evidence based cause and effect chain is the problem of LED spectrum, also known as "blue light". While some people dismiss this as just another gimmick by companies attempting to give the appearance of doing something I think the truth is somewhere in between and related to why some had issues with LED versus CCFL backlights. First attempts were to work around this by altering the image sent out by the graphics card to have less "blue" biased colors. This obviously impacts the picture quality and some users were dissatisfied because "why should we have to ruin everything when this was much less of issue with older monitors?" Also not solving the underlying problem of diodes themselves being biased towards the "blue" side of the spectrum. Software such as Flux, Iris, et al attempted to do the same thing followed by monitor manufactures in hardware. This is where I suspect that cynicism of a gimmick comes from.
Than what slowly happened is presumably because of enough awareness by professionals (such as photographers and video editors), manufacturers embarked on private research and development of LED backlighting technology have a much more balanced spectrum comparable to older "good" monitors, and there have been some anecdotal reports that certain newer backlights are better compared to the common WLED implementations.
If you're wondering what I'm getting at by all this, the message is that without a clear evidence based "cause and effect" relationship the chances of success resolving any issues is close to zero. Having seen how issues are investigated at big tech companies if an issue is vague and cannot be easily reproduced that unless a relevant engineer is REALLY bored and has nothing else to do (yeah right) or experiences it themselves, the most they'd probably do read said issue report and go "Well that's too bad" and close the case. I'm not trying to give anyone faint praise here but for an actual example of this occurring but after some (quite possibly flawed) tests look at the inconclusive Intel/TUV "eye strain investigation". We all know where that ended up.
I strongly suspect the elephant in the room is lack of hard, undisputed research. In combination with the lack of coherent standards and relative "rareness" of this issue we also can't expect the research to come from big tech companies either. So what to do? I think having third parties potentially commission independent research into certain aspects of this issue is possible, but at a minimum it requires known good "control" samples that a majority of people can use, the equipment to empirically measure what's "wrong" in comparison between such devices, potentially a testing environment where people with various known triggers can visit to evaluate devices, First two are especially not cheap (think 4-5 figures USD) and the latter is just hypothetical thinking, but I don't see it as impossible either.
If there's any way to interest anyone at any companies towards solving our issues I would bet it involves having such empirical research in hand, and the "connections" to bypass the usual bureaucracy and related issues.
Best regards
JTL
