Sunspark They aren't re-encoding the video. They are changing the saturation levels in the player. You can open a video in VLC and mess with all sorts of visual filters, none of those impact the underlying video file.
The UI change they made is that in dark mode
I do not use dark mode. That is the "ambient lighting" feature and you can turn it off (which I did), it is not the issue
I got my desktop YouTube application built to a point I can use it, so I can watch YouTube in VLC, and I noticed while messing around with some of the VLC settings that lowering the saturation seems to help. This certainly feels like a color related trigger to me. I have made my app launch VLC at 80% saturation levels and I am going to try that over the next few days, and if I see improvement I will go down lower. The nice thing about using VLC is that I now have total control over how the video is displayed, and they have command line arguments for all their features so I can launch a video with my prferred settings.
I can confirm that something really changed just recently, as soon as I open youtube, I'm getting slight nausea effect, wtf. Chrome: Version 113.0.5672.92
There was a Youtube update May 3. Unfortunately despite my best efforts I cannot find any published, detailed change log to see exactly what was changed, and I have been completely unable to find any way to contact Google or Youtube and submit a question. They are absolutely the least customer focused/accessible technology company I have ever encountered, and I am kinda glad that AI is going to eat their lunch
Google also runs massive A/B tests -- depending on how it's done, one session may be different than another.
This is true although I have no idea why, since they have basically force fielded themselves against any customer contact, I have no idea how they would now the results of any test,
I am also not completely ruling out the allergy theory. I am getting symptoms from other, non YouTube things that usually do not cause me any issues, and historically this is a time of year where my symptoms become even more sensitive. And, oddly enough, at least one thing, Windows 10, is actually MUCH BETTER than usual, I was able to use Win 10 for a few hours without patching with almost no symptoms whatsoever which has never, ever happened before.
Allergies cause inflammation, especially in the sinuses, inflammation impacts nerve function, the likely nerve pathway of our condition goes through the sinus area (most of use have sinus issues and the sinus cavity is high enervated and all sorts of nerve passages go through there), allergies also cause inflation around the eyes and one of the primary nerves involved in our symptoms is the supraorbital branch of the trigeminal nerve, which pierces the muscles surrounding the right eye and could easily be impinged if that area is inflamed due to allergies.
Time will tell if these symptoms start to subside on their own, we'll have to see.