Dark Mode Sucks

I disagree overall. I find it much less painful on the eyes to read in dark mode at night, even if there&#x27;s no evidence for health benefits.<p>I agree that dark mode as an additional UI shouldn&#x27;t be an afterthought, and should be tested fully just like the main UI. Poorly-designed dark mode can be difficult to use because of things like bad contrast.

I remember a time when usability people took pride in the high amount of work they put into what were often pretty damn great user experiences.<p>My takeaway from this post is very different. Minimum work, or even modest work, and the users should be so lucky they get to even use the thing.<p>The trend is already to dumb things down with flat design, tons of stuff not all that discoverable, and on and on I could go.<p>Perhaps usability has peaked, and now posts like this are the rule of the day?<p>Sure hope not, but I do harbor doubts.<p>Put the work in. It&#x27;s the users who make your efforts go. Nobody else does.

I know the author says the article is tongue in cheek but honestly, what&#x27;s he smoking?<p>Forget about physiologically measurable eyestrain for a second. NOT staring at a super bright white light is more comfortable and less jarring in many (arguably nearly all) use cases. Anecdotal for sure, but across friends and family that span dozens of demographics I&#x27;ve never shown dark mode to someone where they then had a bad reaction - all of them found it interesting, if not downright soothing compared to dark mode, and most of them continued using it in the future and even trying to find dark mode on other sites they use.<p>Less subjectively, it really isn&#x27;t hard to make a dark mode interface and complaining about having to do so is wild. Skill issue.

I think that in many cases a program should not need to specify its own colours, and can use the user&#x27;s colours settings in the operating system. Having &quot;light mode&quot; and &quot;dark mode&quot; is mostly unnecessary (this should also be true for web pages that do not have CSS; the user&#x27;s default colours can be used), if you can just customize the colours fully, instead (although presets may be available for users who do not wish to customize the colours).<p>However, one case where it might help is that a program does need to specify some of its own colours, in addition to the standard ones (unless the program already allows customizing its colours; some programs will already do this, which might be helpful anyways, in case of e.g. colour blindness, or a monochrome display, etc). In this case, dark mode might be helpful for the program to know which colours it should use for its additional colours.<p>If you want to be able to automatically set the colours by time of day or by other criteria (e.g. which display it is connected to, or whether or not the output will be diverted to a printer), then a separate program could be used, to configure the system by such things.

Dark mode, especially on an OLED screen is vastly superior IMHO.

I think this troll post is designed to just draw traffic to his site.<p>If you have a HDR capable screen that even in &#x27;normal&#x27; circumstances hovers at a base brigthness of about 500-600 nits, Dark Mode is an absolute necessity.<p>Besides, it makes actual content on screen just pop so much more when it&#x27;s not fighting with the sun that is your white background.<p>Also it prolongs the life of fragile oled screens further as the subpixels don&#x27;t require as much energy to shine.

I agree with him 100%. It hurts my eyes. It&#x27;s extremely frustrating that most sites still don&#x27;t let you toggle between them. It&#x27;s also frustrating that Chrome and Firefox don&#x27;t have a button you can click that changes prefers-color-scheme. They&#x27;re already picking up the value from the OS. Why not let us change it?<p>And before somebody asks, my OS is set to dark mode because the light mode UI is unusable.<p>I can&#x27;t wait for the fad to pass.

This is a terrible take. &quot;Just lowering the brightness&quot; also lowers contrast, which makes text harder to read (among other things). Dark mode allows you to keep that contrast without keeping the perceived brightness, which is a big win.

Whenever I accidentally visit a light mode site I get an immediate small but annoying stabbing pain that feels like it comes from behind my eyeballs. This is empirical evidence that light mode is harmful to me at least for that small moment when switching. Apparently the author thinks that growing up will fix this... but I&#x27;m unconvinced that&#x27;s going to happen.<p>I use darkreader a lot, but for some sites it&#x27;s not so good. If a site has a decent dark mode, or takes a lot of config to get working, I&#x27;ll disable darkreader for the site.<p>Anyway, low effort opinion article.

I&#x27;ll just curse the author to having to read everything from now on in green text on cherry red background, and then just tell him to turn the monitor down or desaturate if they don&#x27;t like it. :D

I think the problem isn&#x27;t dark mode itself, but as the author states &quot;native dark mode support&quot;. If your app is designed in white-mode, it&#x27;s important to know how it is going to look in dark mode, and native support somewhat limits your control over that. This is particularly egregious in email.<p>This is less of a problem in apps and the web, but in email it is absolutely horrendous. But then again, the entire email styling thing is still in the dark ages.

&gt;For very little rewards, we&#x27;ve doubled the work required for interfaces.<p>What, how is it doubling required work? There is so much to do when it comes to interface design than just colors. With a proper logic behind coloring, and a token system, its not that big of a deal. Many people prefer dark mode.<p>Also, changing brightness on an external screen twice a day would be quite tedious... imagine with multiple screens.

&gt; For very little rewards, we&#x27;ve doubled the work required for interfaces.<p>It is not dark mode that was added, but the light one. Dark mode is OG.

I&#x27;m all in on dark mode. All my devices are dark. I find it far easier on my eyes. And out of frustration that most sites don&#x27;t have the option, I&#x27;ve enabled Chrome&#x27;s auto dark mode[0], though this still breaks a few things (worth the cost to me).<p>[0] chrome:&#x2F;&#x2F;flags&#x2F;#enable-force-dark

I disagree. Dark mode is necessary at night. Having the app detects sunlight&#x2F;sundown and adjust appropriately is the best.<p>All it takes is for someone to be forced to work at night one time to appreciate dark mode (e.g. being on-call).

Not a huge proponent of dark mode, but aside: resent the use of <i>Hackers</i> pic on this post. Dade Murphy was wearing sunglasses in the opening scenes while hacking!! Wasn&#x27;t just for an <i>elite</i> look!

I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever disagreed with a post so strongly.

Sorry it&#x27;s more work for designers, but honestly I don&#x27;t actually care. It&#x27;s a nice option for users.

I have very distracting floaters in my eyes and dark mode does a great job of hiding them.

&gt; Is your screen too bright at night? Just turn your brightness down<p>It just doesn&#x27;t work like that, even the lowest setting can be a blast to the eyes if the background is pure white. I have grown especially fond of dark mode due to getting woken up in the middle of the night due to on-call for work. A low brightness setting either makes things too hard to read or is still overly bright.

This guy should really lighten up a bit.

Uhhh, his site is dark mode? Lol

author is teen&#x2F;twenty-something? CHECK