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Comment by mopay | Hacker News Reader

Feels like "dark mode" is an advertisement gimmick more than a useful feature for some products now.

In the post you replied to I stated two specific benefits of dark mode. I don't understand how you got from that post to "gimmick."

- Dark mode saves battery (for OLED displays). The discussion was on "true dark" Vs. grey. Not dark Vs. non-dark modes.

- Dark mode is useful in low light/dark rooms/night usage.

It isn't a gimmick and a lot of people like it. I happen to be one of them. I'd use it even without any battery savings.

No way, dark mode is great. Combine it with an internet browser that has a night mode (Samsung's fork of Chrome) and the phones are significantly more pleasant to use at night.

Dark mode is only great if absolutely every single website and app you use support it, and you are never shown bright images ever, because then your eyes explode. This is, it's useless.

That's a fallacious argument. Imperfect solutions can still be superior to the unmitigated problem, and they are in this case. You're essentially arguing that unless the solution is perfect, they shouldn't even try, and I'd point out you haven't justified or even tried to justify that black or white point of view.

In this case, yes. I think it's better to use light apps at a low brightness level than to use dark apps that might or might not blast a white screen at you. I think that flash of light is terrible for your eyesight, much worse than constant light apps.

I'm inclined to agree with you that sustained periods of darkness that include rapid change of light level may be less healthy for the eyes than consistent levels of overall brighter display with such shocks, but I'd like to see some research to back it up.

> if absolutely every single website

prefers-color-scheme recently landed in all major browsers: https://caniuse.com/#search=prefers-color-scheme

> and app you use support it

This is a prerequisite for that. You're not gonna manually turn on dark mode in every single app for much longer, your OS will support it as a setting and third-party apps (including browsers) will read that setting and adjust accordingly.

I love dark mode because it hides my eye floaters

I dislike "dark modes" and don't use them at all, but I can see that they are of real value to a lot of people and not just a gimmick.

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