30 ms·

Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

• ritchiea 6y ago
  Customize your device for your comfort. Even if there are studies that show on average humans retain information better reading in light mode. That's merely the average! Variation is the only certainty in biology. It's good we have options. First I found I read my kindle more than physical books even though I prefer the look and feel of physical books. Then I found I read even more on my ipad with the kindle app showing white text on a black background. Find what works for you. Or if you are a UX designer, provide options.
  • Barrin92 6y ago
    >Customize your device for your comfort. I think the better advice is, customize your environment for your comfort. Often the reason why people use dark mode is that they use their devices in badly lit environments. It's not a good idea to stare into a bright monitor in a dark room, and the dark mode is arguably the wrong fix for the problem. Reading in dimly lit rooms is known to cause headaches and eye strain and should generally be avoided. If someone really needs to work in a dark environment tools like flux/redshift are a better solution.
    • NoSorryCannot 6y ago
      While true, it'd be nice if they could meet in the middle. Laptops and phones autodim but I can't say I've seen this on desktop monitors. I see dark mode (not enough of it though), auto dark mode much more rarely. Lights that autodim are a thing but not common and usually part of the internet of shit. I don't really want to customize things multiple times daily. And if I have to pick, it will be dark, because it's easier on the eyes when the sun goes down and I dim the lights in anticipation of going to bed.
      • erikbye 6y ago
        > Laptops and phones autodim but I can't say I've seen this on desktop monitors. Modern monitors do have this. Not sure for how many years, but the one I'm currently seated by is 3 years old and has auto dimming.
    • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      I've always had that same theory -- I generally prefer light mode to dark mode, and I've also always preferred working in well-lit rooms.
    • philwelch 6y ago
      > Reading in dimly lit rooms is known to cause headaches and eye strain and should generally be avoided. If you’re reading something purely reflective like paper, sure. If you’re reading a screen that is shooting rays of light directly into your eyeballs though?
      • 6AA4FD 6y ago
        IIRC: Dimly lit room + brightly lit cube means that whenever your vision tracks outside of the cube it will have to adjust the opening of the iris. Doing this a lot will tire your eyes out. My interpretation of this is that we should try to have about the same light level across our work spaces and that this should be a mean between long term comfort and readability. I think most of us could probably benefit from larger font sizes as well which feel easier to read in lower light to me.
    • limomium 6y ago
      My environment isn't "badly lit". I just don't want bright, flickering light blasted into my eyes at my expense. I even block natural light using sunglasses when I go outside! Once upon a time I stared at the Sun for a solid 20 seconds without blinking. I couldn't read text for a month, the letters disappeared from under my center vision. Why in God's name would I want to routinely stare at a bright screen?
• drjeats 6y ago
  This page did not automatically flip to dark mode on any of the browsers I use--which all are on dark mode--on my macbook, which is also using dark mode.
• Finnucane 6y ago
  I don’t like dark mode because of my color blindness. You often get text in dark colors that are hard to see.
• dkdk8283 6y ago
  I adore dark mode - it’s a must have for me. I’m sure the author is correct about fatigue but I use dark mode because I like it.
• CSSer 6y ago
  They taught us this in advertising. White text scatters over the iris on a dark background, so it’s harder to read the copy. I’ve even read it in UX articles. It was amusing to get out of school and into the tech industry to find dark mode everywhere. Granted, I use it too. Both my terminal and editor have dark themes. I’m not really sure why. The terminal isn’t really a big deal to me. I could go either way there. But I’ve just never found a lighter color theme that wasn’t offensive in an editor. I always try them for a bit and end up switching back.
  • gruez 6y ago
    >White text scatters over the iris on a dark background, so it’s harder to read the copy. I’ve even read it in UX articles. That doesn't make sense. Why does light from white text scatter, but not light from white background?
    • 3000000001 6y ago
      This makes intuitive sense to me. I assume it’s to do with more overall light being emitted from a white background/black text combo being easier for our eye to process.
      • coffeeling 6y ago
        Yup, the light theme advantage is due to it emitting more light than a dark theme at the same brightness setting.
    • CSSer 6y ago
      I’ll admit it’s not the best phrasing (and I’m definitely not an ophthalmologist, so I’m playing fast and loose here). Your pupils dilate to let in more light because there’s less light overall when the background is black. This causes your lens to distort slightly, thus making the edges of the white text appear to be fuzzy or bleed into surrounding characters. I couldn’t find a scientific source on this, but a couple articles called it the “Halation effect”. Over time, this creates eye strain, and it’s apparently worse for users who have astigmatism. Of course, if the text is sufficiently large enough, this effect should be at least somewhat mitigated. Generally, at least in my use cases, it’s not large enough. Although the more I think about it, I’m rarely really staring at white on black. It’s usually more like various colors against a very dark navy. I should probably just rest my eyes more...
• impassionedrule 6y ago
  Even dark grey helps save battery on AMOLED displays: https://www.xda-developers.com/amoled-black-vs-gray-dark-mode/ https://www.xda-developers.com/amoled-black-vs-gray-dark-mod... Also, there's been conflicting research if blue light is actually harmful
• zzo38computer 6y ago
  I think that they should mostly avoid CSS when needed, and then it should use the default colours configured by the user. But when they need to specify colours in their document, then they should specify all of them (specifying only some colours and not others causes problems) and use the "prefers-color-scheme" command to implement it. It is then the user's job if they like dark mode or not. If you do not like dark mode, then do not enable it in your web browser.
  • mjevans 6y ago
    This is a relatively new CSS property I hadn't heard of yet. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-color-scheme https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/pref...
• mixmastamyk 6y ago
  No one seems to be mentioning the lighting of the room you're in, inside/outside, or the time of day. Ambient light is one of the primary factors that make light or dark mode better at a particular moment. See redshift to make light mode more tolerable at night.
  • Scarbutt 6y ago
    I just change the brightness of the monitor twice a day.
    • floatrock 6y ago
      ...buried 2 or 3 menu layers deep, using a magic sequence of three buttons to handle all the up-down/left-right multi-level hierarchical menu navigation complexities. One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons. Every keyboard should replace their F-keys with brightness by default (seriously, who uses F-keys? It's wasted real estate.) TV's should do this too. With smart TV's/rokus/firesticks/whatever, what's the use of having a channel toggle? Repurpose that for one-button brightness shifts. I don't need my TV being a spotlight into my face when I turn it on to watch a movie at night with the lights dimmed. Dark mode and red shift are helpful, but really this thread nails it... it's relative contrast that is the big eyestrain contributor. It should be as easy to change brightness as it is volume.
      • jodrellblank 6y ago
        > "One of Apple's biggest innovations imho was to make brightness +/- two of the default keyboard buttons" Microsoft copied this with the Surface Book (at least). And in typical Microsoft style, the dedicated brightness buttons control the brightness of the keyboard internal LEDs. Changing Windows' screen brightness is one of the metakeys + del/backspace, not indicated on them.
        • coffeeling 6y ago
          I just got a new Surface tablet, and the tablet cover keyboard's brightness buttons definitely control the screen, not the keyboard lighting.
• fyfy18 6y ago
  I like dark mode on my phone, because when I want to read at night (i.e. in bed) even on the lowest settings the screen feels too bright on light mode. On my computer though I don't really care, I never use it in a completely dark rom, so at night I just dim the display and have the colour temperature shift.
  • gnicholas 6y ago
    Some phones allow you to go darker than the lowest setting using an accessibility filter. On iOS, you can do this with the Zoom feature (set to 0% zoom and with a dark filter layered on top). I don't know why they don't just offer the filter without having to go through the unintuitive Zoom setting, and I only happened to learn of this feature because I talked to an Apple employee who works on accessibility. I now use this as my triple-click functionality since it is more universal than inverting colors (which can cause issues on some websites, with photos, etc.).
• smcleod 6y ago
  Personally I like dark mode for macOS/iOS windows, menus etc... but light mode inside apps / on websites for reading text such as blogs, ebooks and emails.
  • tdsamardzhiev 6y ago
    I also use light mode on a Mac, as I hate the reflections in dark mode. If there's a nonreflective display though, it's dark mode all the way.
• randormie 6y ago
  I think it also depends on the app. For example Youtube and Twitch where the main content is in video format, dark mode is excellent - just like how the lights turn off in theatres. Now when it comes to typing, in a Markdown app for example, a white background and black font feels more natural - just like a good old piece of paper.
• lkesteloot 6y ago
  "Unless you’re using an OLED or AMOLED screen and your dark mode is truly black – not dark grey, not dark blue, BLACK. There is no difference in power consumption." I thought this was a myth. I looked into it last year and found that power consumption was (roughly) proportional to brightness. At a meta-level, I'm surprised that something with so factual (and testable) an answer can still not be settled.
  • sadfklsjlkjwt 6y ago
    Colour is orthogonal to brightness for LCD screens.
  • tqi 6y ago
    https://www.xda-developers.com/amoled-black-vs-gray-dark-mode/ https://www.xda-developers.com/amoled-black-vs-gray-dark-mod... According to this article there is a difference (between grey and black), but it is very small?
  • justinpombrio 6y ago
    LCD screens are really cool! My dad had a half-broken one at some point, and we peeled the outer layer partly off. It was pure white underneath. Just constant white light, no matter what was being displayed. But if you looked at the pure white with polarized sunglasses, you could see the image! The pixels don't turn on and off, they just change polarization. And there's a thin layer that blocks light of one polarization, but not the other. EDIT: Wikipedia has a picture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display#/media/File:LCDneg.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid-crystal_display#/media/...
  • Izkata 6y ago
    Things have flip-flopped over the years: CRT - Black didn't light up the pixels (I don't remember the details as to how), so it did reduce power usage some. LCD - Had a constant backlight (see sibling comment for details), so there was little to no difference between black and anything else. OLED/AMOLED - Black LEDs are actually turned off, instead of displaying a dark color, so we're back to it saving power - more even than CRTs did.
• gnicholas 6y ago
  > I’ve decided to stop using dark mode across all of my devices, because research suggests that going to the dark side ain’t all that. It makes sense to use research to make a decision that is based on data that applies equally across a population. But for something that is a personal preference, it doesn't make as much sense to rely on population-level data. If you started using dark mode because you liked it, then you shouldn't stop using it because, on average, the general population performs marginally better with light mode.
  • AmericanChopper 6y ago
    I use dark mode IDEs exclusively because light mode ones remind me of my early experiences with Eclipse, Ant builds, and horrible enterprise Java. Which just isn’t something I want to think about when I’m working on projects that I enjoy.
  • satya71 6y ago
    Exactly. That's like saying research suggests that the average person fits best into a medium size T-shirt, so that's best T-shirt for me.
• nikkwong 6y ago
  I thought this article was going to point out that something had been discovered that challenged our belief about the way light influences our own circadian rhythm—nope! Dark mode for me is imperative, since I use my devices at night, and want my body to stay aligned to it's internal biological clock as closely as possible. Pretty significant omission.
• gymshoes 6y ago
  I just use the mode that works better in different applications. I prefer sepia background for reader mode and ebooks. Night themes always for text editors. It also matters a lot on when the room is brightly lit or not.
• koiz 6y ago
  Yes its a great idea... what the hell!
• pfranz 6y ago
  A lot of visual professional apps tend to be color neutral so you don't bias your work. Whether for trendiness or for functional reasons they also all tend to use darker colors for their UI. This seems to extend to audio apps, too. For color-accurate work ambient light is lowered (windows are covered and walls tend to be painted neutral). Even Photoshop transitioned to a darker-and-darker UI between CS4-CS6 (~2015). It's really jarring when spending hours inside these apps and jump to a file browser or web browser and get blasted with light.
• proverbialbunny 6y ago
  >In fact, this very site that you’re on right now automagically flips to dark mode if you’re that way inclined. It does not come up that way for me. I'm on OSX with appearance set to dark. (Firefox 77.0.1) Is there something I'm doing wrong? YC is a light theme too.
  • itsjloh 6y ago
    Kev recently updated his site design and appears to have removed the dark mode option via CSS.
• zeofig 6y ago
  It looks cool and makes me feel like a hacker. I mean, just look at it. It looks fucking cool. You can't deny it.
  • recursive 6y ago
    Using light mode makes me feel like I'm pragmatic since I don't care about looking cool. But I still do.
  • Pinus 6y ago
    For me, dark mode is what you used on old 50 Hz CRT:s, where a light background would flicker so horribly that it drove you crazy in five minutes. If you had the luxury of professional kit, you used black-on-white.
• willjp 6y ago
  Personally, I enjoy changing colourschemes based on where I'm working. Outside on the balcony? Xterm/vim with white background. 11pm in the livingroom? Xterm/vim with dark background. I usually have a browser open when I'm coding, so being able to invert the colours is useful for me. If dark mode isn't dark enough, I wrote a Qt script to overlay 50% black overtop of all screens. Does anyone do this to preserve battery life?
• Animats 6y ago
  At least the dark grey type on a light grey background seems to have gone away. Mostly. Maybe because if you go too far in that direction, Google's crawler decides you're keyword-stuffing with invisible text.
• wenc 6y ago
  Part of the reason I like dark mode is because it looks "computery". I grew with Hercules Monochrome monitors (green on black), and that's always been a comfortable color scheme for me. In my Turbo Pascal days, I began to have an affinity for white text over blue backgrounds. I believe it was during the days of Windows 3.0 (1990) was when white backgrounds became the norm, and we've been stuck with that for over 3 decades. Not even the early X Windows programs had white backgrounds -- Mosaic and Netscape had grey backgrounds and muted chrome. I think dark backgrounds evoke nostalgia (at least among some of us).
  • sime2009 6y ago
    I'll never understand what happened about that time period. We went from the idea of "try minimize eye strain" to "fsck it! White looks great! Let's stare at light bulbs all day!". Grey backgrounds are a lot softer on the eyes. I'm still running black text on light grey as my primary colour scheme for text editing since AmigaDOS 2.0 in the 90s. Seriously.
  • LVB 6y ago
    I recall Word having a “white text on blue” option for quite a while as comfort to the millions moving over from WordPerfect. Blue backgrounds and Borland themes definitely evoke nostalgia.
• galacticaactual 6y ago
  I’m not a computer algorithm. I like what I like, and dark mode makes me like being on my computer when I have to be.
• sevencolors 6y ago
  Personally I appreciate the ability to switch color modes. I've found that when reading articles or text I like dark text on a white background. So news apps are kept in light mode. For development i like that darker themes allows me to see the syntax highlighting better. Plus my partner loves the "rainbow text" and knows when I'm working "matrix time" :)
  • airstrike 6y ago
    > my partner loves the "rainbow text" and knows when I'm working "matrix time" :) I love this. My wife calls it "the black screens"
  • kevsim 6y ago
    Same for me. For reading articles, give me black text on black background please. For code editor, issue tracker, terminal it’s always dark mode
  • petercooper 6y ago
    I've found that when reading articles or text I like dark text on a white background. So news apps are kept in light mode. Same, but a problem nowadays is that if you have your OS in dark mode, some site designers detect this and serve you up dark CSS :-(
• itsjloh 6y ago
  I really wish auto dark mode (based on sunset time I believe) worked better on OSX. On my iPhone it works great and automatically switches to dark mode once the sun sets. On my MacBook it hardly ever remembers to switch across and I'm left with it constantly on light. Really frustrating.
  • aledalgrande 6y ago
    Are you on latest Mac OS? You can set it to switch at sunset.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      The implementation that ships with the system is somewhat poor.
      • aledalgrande 6y ago
        It's funny because it worked perfectly on my 2012 MBP, and now that I am on a 2020 MBP, it switches but later than sunset. :shrug: If I set my city manually then it works.
        • saagarjha 6y ago
          Yeah, I’m not sure why it’s so inconsistent. Mine will never switch if there is a power assertion, which Safari seems to always create for no reason. I’m seriously considering going back to my old solution, which hooked directly into Night Shift to synchronize the appearance with that…
      • baddox 6y ago
        I think it’s dependent on the app. Lots of third party apps don’t seem to correctly implement listening for the theme change. In Chrome, for example, I always have the Dev Tools open in a separate window, and the theme seems to change while my Mac is awake, but if the theme is supposed to change while my Mac is asleep, it won’t ever change even after waking the machine up.
• greggman3 6y ago
  Rather than argue against dark mode because it's bad for your eyes, I'd prefer to focus on how it's hard to do well with user generated content. Let's say you users draw diagrams with SVG and the background defaults to white. You make a dark mode. You can't easily fix the SVG. You can't just set the background to black. The SVG's dark colors won't be readable. You can't just set the dark colors to light colors as you have no idea what the diagram is trying to show. The best you can do is set all images to have a white background so any image with transparency is shown in the default but then you end up with large white rectangles on an otherwise dark page which is jarring. I actually mostly like dark mode. My editors have used dark colors since the 80s. My terminal has been set to a dark color for as long as I can remember on any OS. But, maybe because of bad color choices, I can't focus on stackoverflow's dark mode at all. Maybe it's the blue on dark gray they picked. I don't know what it is but I can't read it.
• BurningFrog 6y ago
  We have centuries of printing experience saying black text on white background is what works best.
  • vnorilo 6y ago
    For paper, which absorps light instead of emitting it.
    • rhizome31 6y ago
      White paper reflects light.
• ezoe 6y ago
  I don't like Dark Mode. I even set my terminal emulator to white background with black text.
  • madacoo 6y ago
    I'm the same. I think because I'm more concerned about the surrounding lighting and making sure the brightness of my monitor is appropriate for that. Once that's done, light mode has greater readability for me than dark mode. I've tried dark mode a few times in the past because I felt like that's what you should use to code. But I simply don't like looking directly at bright text.
• theprotocol 6y ago
  Dark mode has somehow reached meme status on the Internet, not unlike bacon, in that everyone now essentially either "f'ing loves" it or is (jokingly) deemed an untermensch. Personally, I was never into dark mode so this article feels vindicating; nor bacon, for that matter. I think I just committed several incidents of e-blasphemy.
• zachrip 6y ago
  Dark mode is an accessibility feature that people happen to enjoy, I need it.
• aasasd 6y ago
  Apparently light-on-dark is terrible if the person has astigmatism: the edges get very blurry and doubled. There was an article on HN about this, specifically about keynote slides. Also apparently “in Europe and Asia, astigmatism affects between 30 and 60% of adults” (says Wikipedia). I have it too, and couldn't figure out in the past why text sometimes looks horribly blurry and sometimes doesn't. With this knowledge, I realized that dark background is likely a factor. So I like dark mode for the OS interface because it gets out of my way then, and just plain looks better. Same in apps where I click on icons and look at images, like in image editors. For reading, dark mode is torture—both with bright white text and low-contrast dark. When sites begin to switch to the dark mode following the browser, I'll have to disable that in the browser settings or deal with bright system and app interface. However, why I can and do code with dark themes is a mystery. I even tried to bend Emacs to use a light theme for Org-mode and a dark one otherwise (not much luck, though). I do wish that screens in the ‘light mode’ were closer to paper in terms of eye comfort. I had an e-ink device, and it was a godsend, pure bliss—you'd think that lower contrast would make reading harder but no. Something like HN's ‘black on a bit grayish with a hint of red’ emulates the experience somewhat. Just don't make text gray, please. In related news, I'm irked that I can't have high monitor brightness for photographic images but lower for swathes of white background under text and in Jony Ive's bright flat windows. Because, you know, photos don't tend to have flood-fill of 100% white. Maybe I'll kludge something up for the browser to amend this.
  • themodelplumber 6y ago
    Whoa. I just did a quick test with someone who has astigmatism. We switched between Dark and Light themes in Google Keep. They were pretty surprised and said the difference was noticeable, that letters blurred together more in Dark mode.
  • wildrhythms 6y ago
    Wow, this explains so much. I use a light color scheme (think default Eclipse theme) in my editor, even during late night coding binges, because I can see the text more clearly. I also have an astigmatism. Maybe related, text rendering affects me tremendously as well, like Windows/Linux text rendering forces me to squint even when the text is normal sized; but I don't have to squint on Mac OS.
• danielrpa 6y ago
  If you have eye floaters, dark mode is a life saver. The dark spots from floaters can be maddening against a white background
  • tartoran 6y ago
    If you see the floaters then your screen is way to bright. I see my floaters only when looking at the sky during the day and I have lots of them. I think this is because the pupil contracts and the depth of field grows and the floaters project onto the retina
    • callmekit 6y ago
      I think the popularity of dark mode is at least partially because people's monitors set way too bright.
      • tartoran 6y ago
        It is possible, but it is also about preference and the need to occasionally make change. Sometimes it feels cool to have a different environment. I used to enjoy tinkering with this kind of stuff a while ago. Now not so much, I try to go with defaults or minimum changes.
    • danielrpa 6y ago
      I can see mine even on minimum brightness... I just happen to have a couple of pretty dense, yet small, ones.
      • tartoran 6y ago
        It's hard to compare the floaters, I think I have many when I look at a bright lit sky but you may as well have/see/perceive way more. Gotta add that I am not wearing any glasses but my eyes (blue) have always been super sensitive to light, I'm one of those squinter when I forget my sunglasses. I find that cloudy days affect me as much as sunny days if not even more since the light is not coming from one direction I could avoid, it seems like it's coming from everywhere.
• novok 6y ago
  Apple started it to improve battery life for their OLED screen future. Even today there are a bunch of major apps that haven't implemented dark mode yet. You have to start early so devs migrate by the time it's majority.
  • silon42 6y ago
    OLED probably means I can't use the traditional blue background anymore...
• WarOnPrivacy 6y ago
  >Is Dark Mode Such A Good Idea? Yes. >Many people quote light mode as being a contributory factor to eye strain. Based on the reading I’ve done, this doesn’t appear to be true. I'll test that now. - Blindy migraine mode: Hurts. - Dark mode: Doesn't hurt. - Different result ever? No. The above is from the undisputed, worldwide expert on what I feel.
  • garmaine 6y ago
    “Is the sky really blue?”
  • castorp 6y ago
    I'll test it as well: - stupid dark mode: makes me cranky, gives me a headache - light mode: relaxed reading, makes me feel comfortable. - different results ever? No. the above is from the undisputed, worldwide export on what I feel.
  • callmekit 6y ago
    Maybe your monitor is set too bright? The white on the monitor should be roughly as bright as a sheet of white paper in the same room, less than 50% brightness usually.
  • stordoff 6y ago
    Coming at this from a slightly different angle, I have recurrent headaches (present at some level most of the time, and severe for a few hours a most days). When I'm feeling OK, light mode and dark mode are basically equivalent - I _prefer_ light mode, but dark mode isn't a hindrance. When I have a severe headache, light mode is fine, whereas in dark mode I find myself losing my place often, and it's vaguely unpleasant to read in a somewhat undescribable way that just makes me want to look away. It's akin to the text being slightly blurred, even though visually it looks fine. The only conclusion I can can draw from this is that it's going to differ for difference people, and options are good.
  • coffeeling 6y ago
    You likely have your display's brightness set higher than it needs to because the dark mode pixels let less light into your eyes. Secondly, the initial dark-to-light switch is always jarring, and usually more jarring than switching from light to dark (which isn't always jarring, even). But that effect is temporary, and usually disappears by the next day.
• squarefoot 6y ago
  "Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?" Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them. I would never read a white text on black paper newspaper, neither in the dark nor in the light, but I surely find dark mode on screens a billion times more readable than traditional light modes. Useable e-paper displays might change that one day, but the technology is still in its infancy.
  • rhizome31 6y ago
    It depends on the amount of light. Try reading a book outside on a clear summer day when the sun is at its zenith. Your eyes won't even stand it. It doesn't matter that the light comes from a direct source or from reflection. We can easily imagine more extreme experiments using mirrors and spotlights.
  • blunte 6y ago
    It is likely that you have your display brightness too high. Indoors, in light mode, most modern screens need to be set at 50% or lower brightness.
    • adrianN 6y ago
      I completely agree. Modern screens are made to stay readable in direct sunlight. The maximum brightness is really high. The screen I'm currently looking at is at 6/100 and I could probably turn it down a bit more.
    • Tomte 6y ago
      Hold a piece of paper next to the display. If a white background on the display (e.g. open Notepad) is noticeably brighter than the paper, dial down the display's brightness. At work my brightness dial is down to 0. At home it's at 16. It looks wrong at first, but you'll get used to it within a day or so. Colleagues coming to your desk will remark upon it.
  • 6y ago
• raz32dust 6y ago
  Digging into the referenced source [1]: > This result seems to suggest that, even though performance in light mode may be better in the short term, there may be a long-term cost associated with it. So, don't start switching all your terminals and IDEs to light mode just yet. Also, this is just one study. Curious if there are more. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/
• bigtones 6y ago
  This is kinda clickbait - all of the research mentioned was not 'research' at all - all the articles mentioned by the OP as "studies" (apart from the battery section) were from NN, or Nielson Norman Group, which were opinion articles by authors employed at that company lightly referencing a few studies. It's all highly subjective and opinionated at best, and "ain’t all that" is about the best we can say on this subject to date. Research doesn't suggest much at all, except you save battery with dark mode on OLED screens, that at least is conclusive.
  • mattlondon 6y ago
    Or also the British Medical Journal which is not opinions and is widely respected.
• happppy 6y ago
  Yes, it is. I like dark mode because it doesn't hurt my eyes.
• blunte 6y ago
  Anyone presenting (conference/projector) or screen recording for YouTube absolutely should not use dark mode if they want their content to be visible to the largest percentage of viewers. Dark mode is inherently lower contrast, and most displays perform worse on dark content. Plus, some of us like to be outside. With bright sunlit ambient light (not even necessarily direct), dark mode content is practically invisible (just a black screen).
  • mtts 6y ago
    Hahaha ... I teach software development for a living and the first thing we have to students when they start presenting their work is always “please switch to light mode”.
• scythe 6y ago
  The blog post links an article by a usability research group: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ That article mentions a study suggesting that light-mode screen viewing can contribute to myopia. I was very surprised by this. The study is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28904-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28904-x I also found a few things that make me want to consider the findings seriously. The authors are well-known; Schaeffer (corresponding) has an h-index of 50. The study is also cited by a review on myopia from 2019, which notes (original study is [112]): >A recent hypothesis is that the problem may be associated with the predominant use of black text on white background [112]. This hypothesis proposes that the problem lies in the balance of stimulation of ON and OFF visual pathways, with natural scenes leading to balanced stimulation, with black text on white heavily overstimulating OFF pathways. Given that ON-bipolar pathways stimulate release of dopamine from amacrine cells [113], and dopamine agonists can inhibit axial elongation in animal models [114, 115], this is a promising link. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-8491-2_6 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-8491-2_... Ironically, I think I'll be switching devices to dark mode a lot more having found this blog post. But as with any new scientific hypothesis, this one will probably evolve over the coming years.
• cirno 6y ago
  I am not trying to convince the author of this post, but I'd like to speak to other web developers here: yes, please offer a dark mode! When I want to do some light reading in bed at night (I do have a blue light filter on for that), I will often abandon even trying to read pages with white backgrounds because it is quite uncomfortable. I do not care if scientifically I read three words less per minute, this is about perception. A dark mode option on a site shows me the developer cares to cover my use case and makes me more likely to go back. If you need to do a light theme only, then just the HN reddish-tint on the background helps me a lot.
• ajbruin 6y ago
  Also from the linked Nielson Norman Group article: > On the flip side, long-term reading in light mode may be associated with myopia. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/dark-mode/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28904-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-28904-x
• tyler109 6y ago
  "Dark Mode" needs to be implemented on the hardware side, not the software side. At the end of the day the idea is to minimize brightness to: -Save energy -Reduce Eye Strain -Reduce blue light emission However, there is lots of research suggesting, that Dark Mode is more of a placebo than it actually works. There is already a set of new display technologies being developed that have the benefits of "Dark Mode" without the need of extra software, namley E-Paper technology and RLCD. Those are having several advantages over "old" Display technologies: https://imgur.com/a/oPhIu6A https://imgur.com/a/oPhIu6A Dark mode, blue light blocking glasses, etc. are just part of a bigger trend nameley the shrinking backlight industry in the display industry. There are some intersting players developing backlight free screens already and in 5-10 years it will be the standard. Also in terms of screen economics, not even mentioning the material and energy savings. The thing is, that our body/eye has been trained for thousands of years to work with reflective light (to see things/objects through the light reflection of the sun). The screen trend to look directly into backlight over the past decades is very unnatural to our body/vision and caused many problems. We need a screen technology that is very aligned with on how our body is designed and works. Big players in the display market are realizing this and building alternatives. Big players include Sharp, Lenovo, BOE Technologies, JDI, Flex Lightning, Hisense, ONYX, Dasung etc. You can read about screen alternatives (like eink and rlcd) here: https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/h179j5/new_eink_alternative_flexs_optional_front_light/ https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/h179j5/new_eink_alter... PS: There was recently aready a Tablet released with the new RLCD screen technolgoy by BOE-Technologies, check here: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/11/tablet-with-high-refresh-rate.html https://boingboing.net/2020/06/11/tablet-with-high-refresh-r...
• holstvoogd 6y ago
  How about this: we don't argue about what is better, but let ppl do what they want? :)
• blunte 6y ago
  From the comments here I am amazed that many people don't know about brightness controls. We don't listen to our music at 90+% volume always (and then complain that we need amute mode). That would be absurd since there is a volume control that can be used to set the sound output to a level that's just enough louder than the ambient noise level that we can hear as much detail of the music as we like. For displays, we have brightness control which serves the same purpose. With proper brightness adjustment, light mode can and should be very comfortable and natural in all but extremely dark environments.
• ngngngng 6y ago
  I prefer dark mode simply because the dirt/dust/fingerprints on my glasses show more while looking at bright screens. Looking at dark screens I don't notice my glasses being dirty at all. I find it inconvenient to wash my glasses more than once a day, and because of the terribly uncommon shape of my eyes, I can't afford contacts even with my vision "insurance".
• emmanueloga_ 6y ago
  After reading this article from Nielsen about the size of usability studies [1] their research credibility has gone down for me. According to the article, no matter the size of a user base: "... the answer is simple: test 5 users in a usability study. Testing with 5 people lets you find almost as many usability problems as you'd find using many more test participants." Oh wait, but my site has millions of users! "Doesn't matter for the sample size, even if you were doing statistics." Even if you were doing statistics? What does it even mean lol... it just sounds to me they want to justify whatever "studies" they've have in their library. I'd say, unless a Nielsen study is replicated and double checked, probably (pun intended :-p) their studies shouldn't be taken very seriously. 1: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-many-test-users/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-many-test-users/
  • vidarh 6y ago
    The point the article you're quoting is making is that if you insist on a single number then 5 is enough if your question falls in a specific category. Namely, for the purpose of finding the number of people needed to get the biggest payoff in terms of number of usability problems identified. This being the key point they're making: > The main argument for small tests is simply return on investment: testing costs increase with each additional study participant, yet the number of findings quickly reaches the point of diminishing returns. There's little additional benefit to running more than 5 people through the same study; ROI drops like a stone with a bigger N. This doesn't quantify the scale of the reported problems. It goes into it with the assumption that you simply want to find as many of the problems with your site as possible. > Even if you were doing statistics? The sentence you quoted regarding this makes the point that the number of users the site has is not the factor that should drive the size of your panel (you'll note that elsewhere the article argues that where you need statistically significant results you need at least 20 users and more if you need tight confidence intervals). Rather the size of your panel should be determined by your required confidence intervals, and when identifying usability issues is your main concern they don't need to be tight.
• eilgin 6y ago
  Yes, it is. it's that simple and my eyes approve.
• castorp 6y ago
  I absolutely hate dark mode. I even had to install a Firefox plugin to disable dark colors, to make website that use it readable again.
• c3534l 6y ago
  A great deal of people prefer dark mode. The number of people with this strong preference seems like it should be enough. I don't trust the studies cited here one bit: I remember when everyone was citing studies that said sans serif fonts were hard to read. Yeah, people find it hard to read when you change how they're used to reading. As if using a modern website consists of attentively reading large volumes of text serially. Even if it were true, who cares? People like it, let them enjoy it.
• MayorMonty 6y ago
  The most important part is preference IMO. People have the right to choose which is right for them, and if they determine that dark mode is better for them (even if they just think it looks better), having a setting in the OS that cascades down to all applications and websites is just a nice feature to have. This is why prefers-color-scheme is the perfect mechanism for this. Simply swap out your CSS variables and automatically your site is immediately more accessible to people who prefer dark mode.
  • jamil7 6y ago
    Thank you. Everything else around this dicussion is pointless. If some people like light or dark mode thats up to them to choose. At least we're getting some choice back in our UIs.
    • biddlesby 6y ago
      I wouldn't agree with that. People may have made their choice based on incorrect research or incorrect assumptions: there is value in discussing the latest research. It's like saying discussions about whether cigarettes are good or bad for you are pointless, the important thing is that people are able to buy them if they want.
      • jamil7 6y ago
        Well I never made a decision based on a pretense that I was going to save my eyes by switching. I just prefer one particular scheme better and find more pleasant to work with all day, it doesn't need to be anymore complicated than that for me. Your comparison to the cigarette discussion is an interesting point. The article didn't present anything particularly strong in regards to studies around this though so I'm unsure what there is to discuss, aside from speculation on whats good and bad for our eyes. If we're speculating I'd wager regular breaks and getting away from your screen as much as possible is far more impactful that which color scheme you choose.
      • nix23 6y ago
        No sorry, that has nothing to-do with research, but taste. In fact, research like that i call bullshit, its like 'research' food, 'scientists' found out that that people prefer yellow carrots because red is a warning color.
• somehnguy 6y ago
  Thats cool and all but the website hijacks my scrolling and makes it horrible to read. Thats way worse than dark or light mode.
• arexxbifs 6y ago
  I prefer light mode, but I get why people like dark. I think the problem with light mode is that the default approach is black on white. Dark mode almost always has lower contrast between foreground and background. Back when users were still allowed to make decisions, I usually changed the background in Windows text controls from white to a light, warm gray.
• ZoomZoomZoom 6y ago
  Is there a free, preferably open source, reader web app with dark mode? I have an old Lumia lying around which is mostly useless by now but has a nice low-brightness screen. BTW, other ideas are welcomed. Hate abandoning perfectly functional tech.
• dnr 6y ago
  These articles are so bizarre to me: he's writing about dark mode and light mode as if you can just... _choose_ one or the other and be roughly equally happy either way? I would never even think to look at "studies" when it's blindingly obvious: light mode makes my eyes hurt a lot, dark mode is very comfortable. The only time I can even consider using light mode is mid-day with plenty of natural light around. At night when all the lights are dim, even the lowest brightness on my laptop (which is quite low), plus redshift, plus blue-blocking glasses, isn't enough to be comfortable in light mode. I use the "Deluminate" extension for Chrome to make all sites dark, all the time. Perhaps I'm unusually sensitive to light (I think I am), but based on the comments here I think I'm far from alone.
  • mtrycz2 6y ago
    Probably because dark mode has been shoved over us through an aggresive bro culture not unlike MongoDB at the time. That's probably why people want to be vocal about it (not as much as said bro culture still)
    • cecja 6y ago
      Can you give one example app which has a dark mode and no light one?
  • CathedralBorrow 6y ago
    I think this disclaimer at the bottom might explain some of it: > This post is day 04 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. If you want to get involved, you can get more info from https://100daystooffload.com https://100daystooffload.com. I find that the intent behind publishing any piece of content is an incredibly accurate predictor for its usefulness in my experience. When you can ascertain that of course. But essentially, my rule of thumb is that if the chain of events looks like this: 1. I really want to write a blog post 2. What should it be about? then I won't find much useful in it, regardless of the topic. But if it's the other way around: 1. I really want to share this idea of mine 2. What medium should I use to deliver it? then I often find it useful to me, again regardless of the topic. Funnily enough, the title of the author's next blog post in this series captures this idea well: "Writing With SEO In Mind"
• decafbad 6y ago
  My eyes are too sensitive to light. It really hurts. I have to dim the monitors light down to zero. Now almost every website on the net show text with pale-gray color on white background for whatever the sick reason. Some people must be batshit crazy to make text light-gray and also semi-transparent. I can't flippin' read. So http://darkreader.org http://darkreader.org does a great job for me.
• Lio 6y ago
  The use of the phrase “techbro” immediately makes me sceptical of this article. Surely the use of Dark Mode is purely on ascetic grounds. Is anyone really justifying that choice by claiming it’s “easier to read”? This reads like a massive straw man argument.
• boyadjian 6y ago
  Dark Mode is a bad solution, because it solves the wrong problem: - Having black caracters on a clear background is a good thing. - The problem is that using "pure white 6500K" for the background is plain stupidity. - The solution: Amazon has found it, with his software "Kindle for PC" - Having "Sepia" color for the background do the trick : Less blue, that's all - My solution: Tweaking my monitor, to lower the blue component when I work - Only when I play video games, do I restore the normal color temperature
• alfiedotwtf 6y ago
  > Techbros everywhere My migraines and headaches from light sensitivity tell me you’re wrong
• rkagerer 6y ago
  I've found green on black easiest on the eyes, like the original computer monitors. I set up my eBook reader that way. The green is fairly dark (I read before bed at night).
• BruceOxenford 6y ago
  I love dark mode
• playpause 6y ago
  What a weirdly contentious article. This does not need to be a debate with a final answer that everyone shares. It’s personal preference.
• tutfbhuf 6y ago
  From my personal experience dark mode helps my eyes significantly. Without dark mode I get dry eye symptoms within a few hours regardless of the screen, but I can watch a dark screen basically forever without any issues. I also use a slight red shift, the dark reader browser extension, dark terminal, dark vim theme, dark wallpaper and android 10 in dark mode on OLED.
• ozim 6y ago
  Great we are having some one off hunter/gatherer anecdotes. When I work with computer I am not looking at the hills to find some moving spot. Here is one from me: I am focusing my sight like I would be trying to pick berries in the forest. While between trees it is dark and berries are dark, as gatherers we were collecting berries, we should read black text on dark background. Large white screens are overwhelming for me. For me it is better to have dark screen and bright spots to focus on. It helps with development to focus on specific lines instead of trying to get whole screen at once.
• csteubs 6y ago
  Weren't the origins of dark mode (not Amdek origins but mid-2000's) in all those browser extensions that displayed energy savings?
• namelosw 6y ago
  Theoretically white on black is harder to recognize than black on white. When you have the same font weight, the white on black approach tend to make people feel the stroke looks thinner and more blurry. If you are curious you can switch to black on white, then adjust the font weight to the thinnest until you feel it starts to be blurry. When switch back to white on black it would be more blurry to you. But anyway it boils down to preference since people can adjust the font to compensate if it is blurry to them.
• buboard 6y ago
  the thing that that matters in the end is the speed of reading. Interestingly, i can't find a recent legibility study. The one from 2002 suggests small Verdana or largel Arial font.
• rdiddly 6y ago
  Kind of the epitome of bike-sheddding. Way too much importance attached to this on both sides. Want to do something good for your eyes and battery? Turn off the computer and go get an outdoor job like forestry. Yeah I didn't think so. So in that case, my expert advice is for you to use whatever mode you like, and don't worry about what's best. Not everything can, needs to be, or even should be, optimized.
  • erikbye 6y ago
    > Not everything can, needs to be, or even should be, optimized. Anything you do for thousands of hours yearly should definitely be optimized.
• javisantana 6y ago
  Dark mode is very useful for people with "eye problems", for example, eye floaters are small black points you see all the time, they usually appear with the age, dark mode make them "disapear" making you brain happier. Thanks whoever started dark mode trend
  • nurettin 6y ago
    I've got floaters, they are never a concern when reading in dark or light mode until someone reminds me of them. So byebye anecdotal eye floater guy who supports dark mode.
  • bobthedino 6y ago
    I also have floaters, which are visible against a white background regardless of screen brightness, and so I also prefer dark modes for that reason.
• globular-toast 6y ago
  I've never thought that "dark mode" is better for readability or eye strain. It only comes down to preference. And it's a bit weird to quote a load of research to tell people whether or not they prefer one or the other. The point of research like this is to show what should be the default. The default should definitely still be black on white. Dark mode should only be an option. For me dark mode completely misses the point when it comes to eye strain anyway. For more than ten years now I've been using a low contrast colour scheme. It happens to be light on dark, but it's far from white on black (it's called Zenburn). I use this for emacs as well as terminals, which is where 90% of my work is done. I use "dark mode" plugins for Firefox simply because it reduces the contrast between the web and my work
• rooam-dev 6y ago
  I don't know, I guess it depends. I tried recently to switch to gruvbox dark, solarized dark and so other popular themes. It is difficult for me to use them in the day. Gave up after couple of days, switched back to intellij light + redshift app. Late nights i just reduce the overall screen brightness.
• amelius 6y ago
  > When I was in the military, a key tactic of camouflage was to never, under any circumstances, expose yourself on a hilltop or similar, where your silhouette could be easily identified. A dark blob on a light background is far easier for the human eye to see, than the reverse. I hate these obviously one sided arguments. Here they could have said to not use a flashlight while hiding in the dark. But they tactfully left that out.
  • swrobel 6y ago
    Came here to say this and was glad someone beat me to it
• rcarmo 6y ago
  This just reminded me that HN doesn’t have a dark mode. Also, bigger fonts would be nice. I can’t use user scripts or custom CSS on my iPad, and Reader Mode tends to fail here unless I point it to a meatier comment (it looks for the biggest blogs of text), so any tweaks towards improved readability here would be great.
• sildur 6y ago
  > A nice dark screen with light text is easier to read, right? Well, according to multiple studies, that’s wrong apparently. That was really funny. "Do you like chocolate? Well, according to multiple studies, you don't apparently." How can a study tell me what is comfortable for me? Are we going crazy? We are starting to treat studies like little gods which tell us what to do, and apparently, what to like.
  • Veen 6y ago
    > How can a study tell me what is comfortable for me? Unless you are an emigre from Betelgeuse or a particularly intelligent octopus, you have eyes that work in the same way as everyone else's eyes. The biology and physiology of the human eye are well understood. Chocolate is an excellent comparison. Whether you like chocolate is a matter of taste. But you don't get to claim that eating chocolate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner is optimal because you prefer it.
    • wila 6y ago
      Today I learned that I'm a emigre from Betelgeuse or an octopus. Seriously, eye doctors are always interested in how I am even able to see. Which I wasn't at some time, until that got fixed by a brilliant professor.
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • dkersten 6y ago
      Despite that most of our bodies function more or less the same way, everybody has completely different tastes and preferences in many different things.
      • CathedralBorrow 6y ago
        And when you add the human brain into any process you now have something much more complex and much less understood, with much more room for say, personal differences.
• robotmay 6y ago
  Dark modes are a choice. Light modes are a choice. Everyone is free to choose what they like, so trying to influence people one way or another, or criticising their choice, is unproductive. I live in Wales, a country where our default weather is "meh". I live on the dark side of a mountain. I work in a room with no external windows. Yes I use dark modes, and if you used light mode in my office I'd think you were a fucking nutcase, but I'd leave you to it because that's your choice. Light mode in my office is painful, dark mode in bright sunshine doesn't work. Shocker. The parent article here is actually difficult for me to read; the text appears to have ghostly halos for me. Perhaps I'm being hypocritical when my own blog (https://senryu.pub/afternoonrobot https://senryu.pub/afternoonrobot) isn't much different; although I made a concious effort there to make sure it inverts easily with iOS dark-mode/Dark Reader etc.
  • Moru 6y ago
    I agree with you that dark mode is a choice, one that I took many many years ago. My first assembler program was one that inverted the screen with a button press on my Atari ST. This so I could adjust for a dark or a light day. Now I'm using f.lux to turn down the blue light and to invert the screen if needed. Also some firefox plugin to make all homepages darkmode. I have the ghosting halos too but this is something that you need to see an optician for. It can be corrected for but might have different sideeffects that you can or cannot live with :-) For me the world is slightly tipping over to the left if I use the glasses I'm supposed to use. And looking down and then up again is also very hard still after a year.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    > Dark modes are a choice. Light modes are a choice. Everyone is free to choose what they like In the Windows 95 era, we really could just flip a few settings in our OS and everything[0] would conform to our color and font preferences. Unfortunately we have no regressed to the point that only two options are offered, and even then only sometimes. Hooray for progress. [0] very nearly everything.
    • deckard1 6y ago
      Precisely. And then people defend slow bloated software and systems by claiming this software is "doing much more today". Yeah, not really. Google Docs does nothing WordPerfect couldn't do (and much better) back in the '90s. If you take away collaborative editing (which is janky at best, and surely could have been done in the '90s if anyone cared) then Google Docs is doing much much less. Slack is IRC with pictures (which I'm positive existed well before Slack), and yet consumes gigs of RAM. What the fuck are we doing. IRC offered way more customization. Dark mode really gets me though. I've been doing themes on X11 since 1995 at least. You could even do themes on Windows 3.x. Why is everyone killing so much time and energy discussing this binary mode "feature" in 2020? It makes no goddamn sense.
• murermader 6y ago
  It's not like you can use both. If the surrounding is dark, obviously a dark theme will be much nicer and better on the eyes. If it is noon and you are in a brightly lit room, a light theme will obviously work very well.
• titzer 6y ago
  As someone who has been severely visually impaired (thankfully in my case, just a mere two weeks of hiding in a pitch black room in searing pain unable to read at any distance), this is absolutely uninformed nonsense. Dark mode is literally the only thing that some people can look at.
• NullPrefix 6y ago
  >this very site that you’re on right now automagically flips to dark mode Maybe only if you mess with your about:config, haven't found a way to enable that in GUI.
  • tobyhinloopen 6y ago
    Doesn’t it just use CSS queries? My browser automatically converts supported sites to dark at evening, incl my own.
• Shank 6y ago
  I'm a strong believer in night light / f.lux / color temperature changes, but dark mode complements it nicely when working at night. Yes, it sucks to work at night when you need to go to bed. But there is a huge perceptual difference I can feel between f.lux + dark mode or f.flux without it. Using something like Dark Reader on Firefox/Chrome, you can achieve Internet-wide dark mode easily. I think this is ideal if you're in the unfortunate position of needing it. It may decrease legibility but it beats feeling like having ones retinas burned out at night.
• mcv 6y ago
  I'm not really convinced by these arguments. I admit, I'm a light-mode user, and I was happy with the switch from white (or often amber)-on-black DOS screens of the 1980s to black-on-white of the XWindows terminal windows of the 1990s, but that doesn't make the argument that black-on-white is always better true. Most importantly: paper doesn't emit light. Now that I'm behind a massive QHD screen, that thing is shining a lot of light in my face. Even more than the 20" Unix Workstations I used in university. I actually like it a bit darker than all this light. In fact, when a site has a transparent dark layer over its text because it wants me to respond to a popup first, I often prefer to read through that darker overlay. Screens are often too bright. The primary reason I'm using light mode, is that it's the default everywhere and I'm used to it. Youtube in dark mode is confusing, but Discord in dark mode is fine. I haven't tried most websites in dark mode. My phone and my laptop actually do have AMOLED screens, so dark mode would save power in my case. Just not on the big screen I'm currently using.
• rbrbr 6y ago
  If I am sitting in the dark the contest of a white screen to the light in the room caused much more eye strain than that of a dark mode screen. Not sure how the article missed that for me most relevant fact. This is why Apple has a daytime dependent dark/light mode auto switch.
• gfiorav 6y ago
  After all this time, people still don't get we're all different. I have astigmatism, and therefore struggle more than normal when focussing on low contrast images. White over black is terrible contrast. Black over white is the best contrast (the whole reason it became the norm). I turn light themes everywhere and the difference to my eyes is tremendous -- especially when leaving screens for the day (no blurry vision).
• edwinyzh 6y ago
  Not sure why, my eyes have never been able to bear with the dark modes on all software...
• pmlnr 6y ago
  YES. Dark mode is a great idea: it provides a choice. Studies are always "this is true for X amount out of 100%", and X is never 100%, so there are people who prefer dark mode. Me included.
• dan_can_code 6y ago
  > because research suggests that going to the dark side ain’t all that. So what? It's personal preference. A few studies aren't going to affect how most people rationalise it to themselves, because, who cares?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• mouzogu 6y ago
  Something touched on in this article, I suffer from a corneal condition that makes dark mode unusable for me. I have no trouble reading black text on white but trying to read white text on black is impossible. I kind of got a little frustrated by the whole buzz around dark mode interfaces knowing that I wouldn't get any benefit out of it. I'm also annoyed by Steam (and others) for not providing a native light mode - it really is an accessibility issue for some of us. I hope the hype around dark mode won't lead to neglect or worse a complete absence (steam) of a light mode.
• thiagoperes 6y ago
  I have a type of migraine called vestibular migraine and I can confidently say that using dark mode helps A LOT. I agree with previous comments, dark mode is not about optimising for the median, it's about giving more options, just like we did with screen readers, font sizes, etc. It's one of the sad sides of tech: we have all this knowledge about accessibility and this is either siloed or just not talked about. Designers are learning about aesthetics, color theory, typography but not about making your product support as many humans as possible - which is a business outcome!
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Angostura 6y ago
  As someone who worked in the greenscreen era, I’ve always found the obsession with dark mode a bit weird. It’s jolly handy if you want to use your screen at night without waking the wife. Other than that, I don’t find much to recommend it.
• badrabbit 6y ago
  I am not motivated by eye health or other health reasons. I just like/experience darkmode better.
• rsp1984 6y ago
  I get pretty bad "burn-in" effects after reading text in dark mode and then looking away from the screen or at a light-mode site. The lines of texts then form a stripe pattern that's overlaid on everything that I see. Lasts about 1-2 minutes. Needless to say, I avoid dark mode in my job and I loathe websites that force it on me. The effect is worse the higher the contrast between dark background and bright text and the longer I've been reading. Anyone else have this problem?
  • rbobby 6y ago
    Exactly the same for me. I find it so uncomfortable that I won't use any darkmode interface and pretty much always shun darkmode web pages. My worst experience was with jsFiddle. They switched to darkmode only, which ended my use of the site for a long time. I just recently found this GreaseMonkey script https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/403402-jsfiddle-light-theme https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/403402-jsfiddle-light-them... that puts jsFiddle back to light mode.
• marcus_holmes 6y ago
  Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyeballs. They're grading experiences on a bell curve and taking the median. We all experience things differently. This is the "fighter jet seat problem" - if you use the average then it fits no-one. 3. Even if I had average eyeballs (and I probably do), I doubt my situation is anything like the test subjects in the experiments. My home office isn't set up that well (I'm working on it). 4. My research, conducted using my eyeballs in my home office on my equipment, shows I prefer dark mode. I have tried both, and dark mode was the more comfortable experience. My experiment beats "multiple studies" for my situation. Yours may be different.
  • trash_cat 6y ago
    Dark mode is a matter of demand, not if it's good for you. The real questions scientists should be asking why people want it in the first place. Other than that, I agree with your sentiment.
    • pdimitar 6y ago
      People wanted dark modes of websites since the dawn of the web itself. It's just that it was too inconvenient for companies to maintain at least two designs at the same time so they happily turned a blind eye to the requests.
  • yiyus 6y ago
    Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments.
    • pdimitar 6y ago
      > If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. Sampling. It probably feels good hand-waving away the problem of "does this study apply to everyone?" by introducing the "representative sample" construct, but it has its problems and I doubt they will be ever solved. You can't speak for everyone when you have several thousands samples -- out of ~8 billion people. This is kind of akin to that artificially absurd example of "on average, every human on Earth has one testicle". (And don't get nitpicky here, please; it might be "median" or another term, and that's not the point.) What your parent poster says is that this article is kind of hiding behind science to be able to claim a generalisation it makes is true. Which it still isn't. Most people I asked said they prefer dark mode. Some said they like light mode. This article changes none of that.
• plastman 6y ago
  yes. too much bright hurts my eyes. dark is comfortable to look at
• teekert 6y ago
  Well, I like Dark Mode on all the things. But there is no arguing that more light make my pupils contract and there for there is more depth of focus (like high F number in photography) and things are easier to read with a variety of eye deviations. My wife always puts our TV in a very dim setting and complains about headache when I set it to max brightness. But I really get tired after watching a dim screen for 10+ min. I have aspherical lenses (different spherical radius in x vs y direction), not sure what the correct term is.
• pdimitar 6y ago
  With a title like that, no productive discussion can be sparkled. As other posters said and I am just going to repeat: the scientists can pull as many studies as they like. I find dark mode to be objectively better for me. It doesn't strain my eyes and is much more readable and quick to consume the content in 99% of the time -- there are rare exceptions but they are just that, rare exceptions. Not sure how useful such an article is. It still reads like an opinion piece.
• etiam 6y ago
  Recall "Reading and Myopia: Contrast Polarity Matters" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20207577 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20207577 In myopia the eye grows too long, generating poorly focused retinal images when people try to look at a distance. Myopia is tightly linked to the educational status and is on the rise worldwide. It is still not clear which kind of visual experience stimulates eye growth in children and students when they study. We propose a new and perhaps unexpected reason. Work in animal models has shown that selective activation of ON or OFF pathways has also selective effects on eye growth. This is likely to be true also in humans. Using custom-developed software to process video frames of the visual environment in realtime we quantified relative ON and OFF stimulus strengths. We found that ON and OFF inputs were largely balanced in natural environments. However, black text on white paper heavily overstimulated retinal OFF pathways. Conversely, white text on black paper overstimulated ON pathways. Using optical coherence tomography (OCT) in young human subjects, we found that the choroid, the heavily perfused layer behind the retina in the eye, becomes about 16 µm thinner in only one hour when subjects read black text on white background but about 10 µm thicker when they read white text from black background. Studies both in animal models and in humans have shown that thinner choroids are associated with myopia development and thicker choroids with myopia inhibition. Therefore, reading white text from a black screen or tablet may be a way to inhibit myopia, while conventional black text on white background may stimulate myopia.
• mamon 6y ago
  Isn’t the dark mode something invented primarily as energy saving feature for OLED screens? I never even considered it to be protective for eyes.
• cyberjunkie 6y ago
  I'm squinting as I read this.
• hkon 6y ago
  I use dark mode when it's low light in my surroundings and a lighter colored mode when it's daylight. This is because I find that my monitor reflects more shine/glare when I have dark mode on in the daytime. And in the evening/night the white is also too bright, even though I am using f.lux etc.
• slowhadoken 6y ago
  Y E S
• aaron695 6y ago
  Not a lot of evidence behind f.lux either, but everyone just took it on which is interesting.
• jasoneckert 6y ago
  There is quite a bit of personal preference in every situation where someone prefers Dark vs Light Mode. I prefer Dark Mode for certain tasks and in certain environments (lighting conditions, etc.), while I prefer Light Mode for other tasks and in other environments. Moreover, I've experienced times where both modes have caused fatigue of some sort. Thus, I'm skeptical whether an argument can be made for one mode over the other in all situations.
• giggly_gopher 6y ago
  I used to use dark mode, but now I just turn down the total brightness of my screen and I like it much more. I think people are confusing eye strain for staring at a bright light all day.
• upofadown 6y ago
  Dark mode is certainly better if you have haze problems (e.g. cataracts). The last thing you want in that case is a lot of extra light around to be diffused all over the stuff you are trying to see.
• artistsvoid 6y ago
  I switched after years of dark mode as well, just a few days ago. The initial reason that it is very hard to get a consistent nice dark-mode experience across applications; think for example pdfs (which look ugly w/ inverted colors), or screen flickering during load times of programs, non optimized websites, video content, et cetera. solarized light, redshift and just turn screen brightness down and it actually still looks ugly to me, but regarding eye strain, having proper syntax highlighting, and being less annoyed about the things mentioned above, it is fine and I might stick to this setup; once you are focusing you don't notice the ugliness. https://i.imgur.com/xakys4y.png https://i.imgur.com/xakys4y.png reminded me of ACME, so I guess rob was just spot on way back https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Acme.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Acme.png
  • artistsvoid 6y ago
    s/ACME/Acme (noprocrast setting hit me, can't edit anymore) But what what I wanted to say: I changed my i3 colors to solarized light (vim status bar as well), can have a look here: https://i.imgur.com/B4EaE4l.png https://i.imgur.com/B4EaE4l.png
• Razengan 6y ago
  Is giving people options such a good idea? I wish I, as a lazy developer, had to do the least amount of work to make the most amount of users use my software, the quality of their experience be darned. Electron gets me through most of the way. For the rest I have to write articles to convince people about the unnecessity of anything that makes me do extra work. If someone could write a tool to automate such articles that would be great.
• kd0amg 6y ago
  Many people perceive light mode as the cause of eye strain. But blue light, among other things, is actually the cause of it most of the time. That seems like an explanation of why to prefer dark mode over light mode when those are the choices available. Or are app/web developers making dark mode versions that actually use bright blue light?
• pacoverdi 6y ago
  Reasons I use dark mode after decades of using light mode: 1. eye floaters: I keep noticing them with light backgrounds 2. poor office environment: with too much sunlight entering the windows, I have to boost screen brightness, which nukes my retina unless I use dark mode 3. poor screen: I have a Samsung UHD screen in which it is almost impossible to lower the brightness, dark mode is a relief
• dboreham 6y ago
  I'm so old that light mode seems like the new thing.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  I don't use it in my development environment. I tried it for a while, but didn't like it. Totally unscientific, visceral reaction, but there you go. My preference is dark text on a parchment (off-white) background. Sort of like HN. I've "trained" myself to weather uncomfortable stuff many times (for example, the keyboard that I'm using to write this very post is new, and I keep hitting wrong keys. That will stop, soon), so it wasn't just "old boomer no likee dark."
• bgeeek 6y ago
  Maybe, maybe not. The thing that I prefer is choice, let people decide for themselves. I prefer the option of having dark/dim modes when I have a migraine (yes, I shouldn't be using a computer then but sometimes you need to).
• huffmsa 6y ago
  > A dark blob on a light background is easier to see than the reverse In the day perhaps. But a guy holding a flashlight at night is pretty damn visible. Article doesn't cover it specifically, but I'd be interested to see how people perceive the ease of dark mode on OLED vs "dark mode" on LED.
• chewbacha 6y ago
  One thing not noted or studied is the impact on using your phone in bed next to your partner. Light mode lights up the bedroom and disturbs my partner while dark mode does not.
• alanbernstein 6y ago
  > When I was in the military, a key tactic of camouflage was to never, under any circumstances, expose yourself on a hilltop or similar, where your silhouette could be easily identified. A dark blob on a light background is far easier for the human eye to see, than the reverse. This is absurd. You know what's EASIEST to see? A shining light bulb against a background of darkness. I am skeptical about this suggestion of evolutionary reasons to explain computer screen settings. Obviously any vision task is influenced by our evolutionary history, but we did not evolve to read text at all. Independent of that, there are at least two parameters that I can control, usually much more easily than light/dark. I can adjust text size, per application, and I can adjust screen brightness, per machine. These things allow fine control of 1) ease of reading, 2) total light output. Any study that considers the binary light/dark setting and ignores anything more fine-grained is completely missing the point.
• vikin9 6y ago
  I skip reading articles with white background when in bed, because the screen light is too bright even at the lowest screen brightness setting. Fortunately HN client can display comments white on dark :)
• taylodl 6y ago
  Yes. I thought Dark Mode was some cool hipster shit until it shipped in iOS. I enabled it just to see what all the fuss was about. I love it and I'll never go back. For me the win is noticeably reduced eyestrain. OTOH I know people who tried it and hated it. Just because I like it doesn't mean you have to like it. I think it's awesome to have choices.
• kstenerud 6y ago
  I wonder how much of the HN discussion stems from what time of day people typically read text on their devices? I'm one of those morning people, who works best from 5:00 AM to around noon. I like white backgrounds and black text, with lots of contrast. Anything else is just harder to read, and contributes to eye strain. These new dark UIs, and also flat UIs in general are just harder for me to read and harder to identify and separate the components, so I try to avoid them when I can. The Windows 10 UI is a particularly egregious example. The sun deck on my farm is my ideal development environment. However, I can imagine that someone who generally works in a dark environment would prefer a dark background so as not to blast their eyes with light.
  • cosmodisk 6y ago
    >I wonder how much of the HN discussion stems from what time of day people typically read text on their devices? It does matter a lot.Entire marketing strategies are based om when is the best time to post things on SM platforms.
• ceronman 6y ago
  Anecdotally, I've always preferred light mode. Specially for coding. First thing I do on a fresh OS install is to change the terminal to white background with black text. I definitely feel more eye strain on dark UIs. I don't understand those who prefer Dark mode, but hey, if that's what you like, and it works for you, I'm all for having that choice on every program. Not all eyes are equal. Although I read somewhere that weather Dark or Light background is better depends a lot on your environment. If you are in a very bright environment, next to big windows or intense artificial light, then Light is better. If you are in a darker environment then Dark is better. This matches my experience. What I think it's definitely bad is constantly switching between Dark and Light. If I do that I get a headache very quickly. This makes Dark specially bad for me because even if I code in a Dark IDE, if I switch to the browser, the majority of websites use Light mode. And this switch causes me pain.
• limomium 6y ago
  Here's an aspect of this I never see mentioned: DARK MODE SAVES BATTERY on mobile devices. The screen uses energy to emit light. The less light it has to emit, the less energy it needs. The longer your battery lasts.
  • ketzu 6y ago
    It's not only mentioned quite often, it is especially in the article. They argue that dark mode only saves battery if: * Dark mode is truly black (not dark grey) and * You use OLED or AMOLED screens. But when that's the case it can save up to 41% of energy. They then argue, that if dark mode were to be a health detriment, that would be more important than battery charge. (Note: That's what they argue. There are results that show that power consumtion scales mostly linearly with output brightness. Which would contradict the results in the article.)
• petercooper 6y ago
  I love dark mode for my UI chrome, etc, but hate it for documents and emails. Sadly having dark mode enabled on my Mac seems to make site designers think I also want the Web to look like an adult site. I've heard there's a way to force Chrome to override this feature but I haven't got round to trying it yet as it's only a handful of sites that do it (so far).
• EGreg 6y ago
  Anyone here experience this thing with dark modes that the colors shapes stick in your eyes afterwards? Try old black-background websites with some neon color text and tel me how you feel. For me there is too much risk of that with dark mode. The white background already gives me all the light I need so my eyes adjust and any colors can be used. I would recommend a light gray background for the least strain on the eyes.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  There are mainly three relevant, scientific facts that has to do with light mode and dark mode. 1) That points of light spread in your retina, while "points of dark" (absence of light) do not. For this reason, light text on a dark background (dark mode) "bleeds" in your retina, which depending on your vision, becomes blurry and less in-focus, and letterforms begin to run into and merge with each other. This decreases legibility. Squinting reduces the amount of light, and is a common response to increase focus. Squinting is a cause of eyestrain. Turning down the brightness helps but may cause the text to be too dim, by the point where bleed is insignificant. Dark text on a light background (light mode), on the other hand, has surrounding light bleed into it. This reduces contrast a little bit, but because modern screens already have so much contrast (and black-on-white is usually too high contrast anyways), but legibility remains ideal and there's no eyestrain due to focus problems. 2) That for dark text on a light background (light mode), an overly bright screen relative to the surroundings may cause eyestrain, as you squint to compensate. The maximum brightness on your screen is often too bright unless you're in a super sunny room. To correct this, hold a piece of white office paper next to your screen, and reduce brightness until the screen matches. (If you're watching movies or something, however, you'll probably want maximum brightness.) 3) That lots of light, apparently blue light, before bedtime, can work against you falling asleep. What's this all add up to? Well, if you're young with amazing eyesight, you might be able to do whatever you want, but you'll have an easier time if you don't keep things at maximum brightness when working, no matter which mode you're using. And if it's close to bed then either f.lux or Night Shift are a good idea, with a dim screen if using light mode, or a not-too-bright screen if using dark mode. But that for normal work during the day, if you have fairly average or worse vision? Light mode absolutely wins the day in terms of eyestrain and legibility, as long as your screen is kept to the brightness of a white piece of paper, and not more. But if you just like the aesthetics of dark mode and you don't get eyestrain or headaches from any squinting? Then go ahead. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that long-term squinting causes any long-term vision deterioration. But as you get older, you may find yourself needing to switch back to light mode one day.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• highmastdon 6y ago
  This is precisely the reason I'm using Flux (or f.lux) DURING THE DAY to eliminate the amount of blue in the screen. I'm currently using 4800K. The reason is twofold; 1. my screen now better blends in into the surrounding light and therefore feels more natural to look at and 2. in order to preserve my ability to see blue light. Research has shown (can't find it now, but it seems reasonable) that when you look too much to screens, the ability to see blue light becomes less as your brain tries to compensate for the amount of blue light, in order to give a more natural view of the screen. Next to that, I'm putting the brightness of my MacBook and monitor that much lower, so it's about the same brightness as the surroundings. Meaning, brighter when I'm outside or the sun shines brightly in my room, darker when it's darker out- or inside.
• sourabhv 6y ago
  This article is pointless. This is a personal preference. Quickly Everyone! Switch your editors and IDEs to light theme, because someone on internet says they think its better.
• bokbok8379 6y ago
  I prefer light mode, therefore let's remove the option to choose dark mode from everywhere because only my opinion matters. Here's some scientific studies that back up my opinion.
• ChrisRR 6y ago
  As a person with 2 astigmatisms in different directions which smear white light, i thoroughly appreciate dark mode
• tim58 6y ago
  The article talks about eye strain, and states that using the OS's blue light filter is a better way to reduce eye strain. The blue light filter significantly reduces the amount of contrast, which makes the screen harder to use, especially with something like an IDE/Text Editor with many colors of syntax highlighting. I'd personally like to know if dark mode has less eye strain than default mode instead of knowing what the absolute best way to avoid eye strain is.
• Chromozon 6y ago
  I remember reading an article years ago which explained that the reason people get eyestrain from a white background is that the monitor's brightness is set way too high. With high brightness, the monitor acts as a light shining directly at you all day. Instead, you want it to be more like paper- low light emission but still readable due to contrast. At the time, I was using dark mode heavily, but I was still having bad eye strain. I tried lowering the brightness of the monitor, and the problem went away. Since then, I've only used light mode with a low brightness setting of 30 out of 100. I encourage people to experiment with it. Note, if you are not used to low brightness, the monitor will look incredibly dim. But your eyes will adjust quickly- mine only took a few minutes.
• agumonkey 6y ago
  I encountered dark modes in old CGI applications, it was the norm and it was at least a zero cost thing. I never regretted the usual win/mac style. I'd bet a dollar that nobody in the media industry had issues with dark mode.
• acd 6y ago
  I think it’s a matter of personal preference. Though I wish most apps would use light mode by default.
• jjice 6y ago
  > A better remedy for eye strain would be to enable night light on your operating system, which will reduce the your screen’s blue light output. When I got my current Android phone (a year and a half ago), I was so confused as to why my screen got a blue hue at night. After finding out what it was, I figure it would be good to leave on, and I even set it up on my Ubuntu machine. Holy cow do I depend on it now. If I look at a screen late in the day without a blue light filter, I notice a serious difference. I don't know if I've just gotten used to the blue light filter, or if it really is helpful, but I've become a dedicated fan.
  • betenoire 6y ago
    I also have it enabled on my phone and laptops constantly. I also turn down the brightness quite a bit. It always looks wrong for the first few moments, and then it looks perfectly normal. Just like wearing tinted glasses.
• dangus 6y ago
  I don’t need any of the scientific research to choose dark mode, just my own opinion for my own uses. I can use my phone in bed at night without the brightness being crazy. Case closed. Also, it looks cooler, especially since my phone has an OLED display (which should also mean lower battery consumption). Case closed even further.
• hedora 6y ago
  Why must all sites be gray on gray? There is a perfectly good brightness slider on my phone. If the white text is too bright, I can adjust it. Also, I paid extra for a monitor / phone with a decent contrast ratio. Why won’t the internet let me have nice things?
• holbue 6y ago
  Dark Mode is much better for writing code with good quality. As everyone knows: Light attracts bugs! (SCNR)
• s_y_n_t_a_x 6y ago
  1. Use dark mode 2. Filter blue light 3. Have ambient lighting 4. Your retinas will thank you
• bxrxdx 6y ago
  Its ok to use dark mode just because you like it.
• artur_makly 6y ago
  It works great for our auto-generated visualsitemaps. When we tried showing our dataViz in light-mode..it failed miserably. However we may consider adding an *optional light-mode for the rest of the dashboard screens. https://visualsitemaps.com https://visualsitemaps.com
• radium3d 6y ago
  I prefer dark mode as far as eye strain goes. My goal is to reduce the amount of light I'm staring at since I stare into a screen for a large portion of my day. Do take note of you are a designer though that I prefer a gray text black background. White text on black is too much contrast in most cases for me.
• Aardwolf 6y ago
  Why is dark mode treated as something new since around a year or so? Look at 70's terminals and 80's DOS computers. Notice how they are green on black, light gray on black or amber on black: dark mode. Look at code editors from the 90s or early 2000s. They allowed choosing color schemes, many of which were light text on dark background. Look at websites from the 90s and mid 2000s: there was still some diversity in design back then, some allowed switching CSS color schemes by the user. Look at Windows 3.11, Windows 98, XP, etc...: allowed changing all the colors of everything (no clue how the situation in Windows 10 is). Android also has been having white text on black in various iterations of early to recent versions, especially for OLED screens. Etc...
• waffletower 6y ago
  This article is the epitome of faulty generalization. Visual astigmatism is one of the most common eye conditions. Reducing the quantity of light on the screen greatly reduces glare and light scatter for those effected. And this is only one eye condition where illuminated black on white printing is far less than ideal. Some readers, particularly those who are older, have a large number of "eye floaters", fibers that float in the vitreous of the eye. Illuminated black on white printing exposes these far more readily to the reader, making reading more challenging and chaotic.
• atombender 6y ago
  One annoying thing I've noticed is that a low brightness setting on the iPhone screen makes a big difference with light vs. dark mode. For example, at night, sitting in a low-lit living room, I can set the brightness to 20% and comfortably read articles where the text is black on a white background. But if I then switch to a "dark mode" app that has white text on a black/gray background, I need to bump the brightness up to 30-40% for it to be comfortable. I'm not sure what the solution is, or even what the "scientific" explanation is. Isn't the contrast exactly the same? Surely this is not an uncommon problem?
• unnouinceput 6y ago
  I'm a light mode user. I don't like dark mode for my work. But I also don't imposed on anyone. Everybody's free to use what they consider best for their eyes/work. It's the same as what shortcuts/icons to keep at hand on desktop/quickLaunch, it's a personal preference. So when I hear some fanboy about dark mode this and dark mode that I roll my eyes and try to ignore it until shoves it in my eyes with his "I know better" attitude. At which point I kindly remind him that I don't go in his house and rearrange furniture to my liking and better change the subject
• derefr 6y ago
  One thing I know is pretty well-researched about light, is that our brains produce dopamine in response to optic-nerve signals hitting our https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus. This response is what causes circadian entrainment, but it also just has the same effect as any other dopaminergic agonism in the brain: increasing motivational arousal. This is why light-therapy lamps warn you not to use them for more than 30 minutes at a time: the excess dopamine produced by your SCN will put you into a state of mania. Up to a point, people work better with more dopamine in their brains. (Many people have subclinical/undiagnosed ADHD, and work especially better with more dopamine in their brains.) One way to make people's brains produce more dopamine is to make them stare directly into bright light sources. Therefore, light-mode is very likely to be observed as "more productive" for anyone who's not already saturating their dopamine receptors by other means (drugs et al.) ----- Fun tangent that I like to bring up, because few people seem to have heard of it: This dopamine agonism in the SCN also increases muscle tone in muscles with nerve connections afferent to the SCN, e.g. the orbital muscles of the eye (chemical "feedback" through the optic nerve, essentially.) The current hypothesis for the development of myopia (nearsightedness) is that the eye's orbital muscles must receive a certain amount of dopamine during the development/growth of the skull to keep the eye pressed into the right shape relative to the ocular orbit. In people who don't get enough bright-light exposure to consistently trigger dopamine release from the SCN, their orbital muscles remain slack, allowing their eye to "relax" wider into the orbit, leading to the retina growing into position further away from the cornea, and thus leading to myopia. This means that children don't get nearsighted from doing "close work" all day; but they do become nearsighted from staying inside all day, where they aren't getting enough SCN stimulation from the lower indoor light levels. The likely "fix" for the epidemic of nearsightedness is to get kids to do even sedentary activities outside. (And for people who live in places where it's cloudy/raining most of the year, to get indoor lighting equivalent in light output to a light-therapy lamp.)
  • htfu 6y ago
    A lot of your points look suspect to me, could you link to some studies? While light surely ought to affect dopamine levels[0] isn't this in both senses secondary to - downstream from, the main melatonin/cortisol cycle driving our circadian rhythms? Your linked wiki article contains zero mentions of dopamine. If 30 minute+ light-therapy made you manic so would working a field in summer, a hundred times over. Outside of drugs and illness there is little one can do to escape even short-term homeostasis. Nothing is linear and everything has feedback limiting it. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3819153/#!po=50.0000 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3819153/#!po=50...
• pier25 6y ago
  I used dark mode for about 8 years and I've gone back to light mode recently. It looks less cool, but my eye strain is gone and I've been able to go back to my older glasses. I'm now almost certain 8-10 daily hours of reading code in dark mode contributed negatively to my vision.
• _curious_ 6y ago
  Had to stop reading when the author used the word "techbros"
• werber 6y ago
  I have been a die dark mode user till trying Facebook’s version. I have such a hard time finding anything
• falcrist 6y ago
  I know this sounds like a hot-take, but any analysis of "dark mode vs. light mode" that doesn't account for ambient light is HIGHLY suspect. This is particularly true if the analysis looks at eye-strain. I work for a business that does contract work, and I find myself working from a variety of offices, including one in my apartment. In offices where there's often a lot of ambient light, dark mode is substantially harder to read due to the added glare. In offices with low ambient light, light mode becomes more likely to cause eye-strain. This can be compensated for to a certain degree by changing the brightness and contrast settings on the monitor, but it's not a complete panacea. Of course, the whole discussion goes completely off the rails when you're talking about anything other than a monitor on a laptop or desktop computer. This is because different use-cases will dramatically bias the decision of which theme is best depending on how and where you use the device. For examples: Dark mode is MUCH harder to read when used with a projector, but it actually helps extend battery life on my phone. Dark mode is also less jarring on my smart TV when navigating in and out of videos and movies at night. IMO, just use what you want to use, and don't worry too much about which theme saves you a few milliseconds of response time or reduces eye-strain by some infinitesimal amount. Nobody is going blind because of their choice of theme. Nobody is suddenly 10% faster at coding. "Dark mode vs. Light mode" is almost entirely an aesthetic choice.
• seph-reed 6y ago
  Are you in a light room or a dark room?
• somerandomness 6y ago
  On OLED screens, black pixels may actually be off, potentially reducing total light exposure significantly. Any studies about whether that’s good for you?
• imchillyb 6y ago
  I only use dark mode. Been doing this for years and I wouldn’t go back.
• Ginrenn 6y ago
  I personally don't prefer it, but the significant battery life increase makes it worth it.
• mistersys 6y ago
  I'd be more interested in a study specifically around coding, as coding in dark mode is even more popular then general dark mode. Perhaps it's just the historical nature of coding on older displays that couldn't render white on black well, however I suspect that has more to do with syntax highlighting. Colors show up much better against a black background, which probably helps in visually recognizing syntax forms via clearer colors. The only time I've used light mode while coding is when coding outdoors, where dark mode is simply too dark for the ambient environment.
• _emacsomancer_ 6y ago
  I can certainly believe that lots of 'dark modes' are not well implemented and could lead to eye strain &c. I'm not sure that this demonstrates that dark mode is a bad idea in general.
• Grue3 6y ago
  I think there were studies that black text on yellow background is the easiest to read. Yellow Mode when?
• realangelbaby95 6y ago
  It. Ant yours
• realangelbaby95 6y ago
  Were you mommy arron
• docuru 6y ago
  > When I was in the military, a key tactic of camouflage was to never, under any circumstances, expose yourself on a hilltop or similar, where your silhouette could be easily identified. A dark blob on a light background is far easier for the human eye to see, than the reverse. I don’t think this is a good example. He is missing one important factor, which is lighting. There is a back-light on screen, which make light colors pop out of the dark background. While at night, since it’s in a low-light environment, our eyes can’t really see the colors. I’m done reading!
  • docuru 6y ago
    P/s: If the writer compare light mode as a dark blob on a light background, dark mode should be showing a phone with light screen at night. It is pretty easy to see too
• zwq 6y ago
  This discussion looks like a harmless discussion about preference. But when it comes to a situation where you are deprived of natural sunlight because your co-workers use a dark mode and need the room to be pitch dark - this is when it becomes very harmful.
• chadlavi 6y ago
  I don't use dark mode because of any of these specious reasons; I just like the way it looks. I think probably a lot of other people choose it for the same reason. It's not that big a deal.
• musicale 6y ago
  I have been using dark mode for years, usually green-on-black (though sometimes amber) for code editing and notes. Not all typefaces look good in dark mode however. Maybe I prefer it because of retro-cool-nostalgia, but most of the time it just feels less stressful. Dark mode also seems to be superior for phones and smartwatches in dark environments. One of these days I want to try red-on-black for reading and writing in a darkened room, as red light seems better for not interfering with night vision.