edit: Updated comment and link to dang's answer
But, with a site this big, any change is going to make someone unhappy. So, I can appreciate his hands off approach here.
It seems a bunch of people have tried it. Some notes:
* Why have people given it a blue-ish tint? HN if anything has a warm tint. I think a neutral grey is most acceptable.
* People that are suggesting high contrast for mobile: On mobile you have a plethora of apps.
* People that are suggesting high contrast for accessibility: People with vision problems likely have some other thing to make it high contrast.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hack-for-hacker-news-yc/id1464...
To the HN mods, dark mode is an accessibility feature. Please consider adding it
The current interface has all kinds of accessibility problems, including insufficient color contrast, calling dark mode an accessibility feature isn't likely to be persuasive.
While I'm sure dark modes are helpful to some people with their disabilities, I think the expectation for accessibility should be sites robust enough to be usable when user agents automatically change colors to meet the user's needs.
It's amazing the kind of opinions you'll chance upon on the interwebs...
It's also easy to configure to get a totally black background on HN for an OLED screen.
html { background-color: #fff; filter: invert(1); } body > center > table > tbody > tr:first-of-type { filter: invert(1); }
Yeah, you could make micro adjustments, but that adds almost zero bloat...
That means those who want dark mode can get dark mode, and those who want whatever other zany random style changes they want can get that too. (Yeah you can use an extension, but an extension isn't very friendly if you use different browsers on different devices–e.g I use Chrome on my Mac and Safari on my iPhone.)
Wikipedia has something like that:
Seriously though, this could be a nicely elegant solution, especially if there was "suggested CSS to do X is, paste it below" or something.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...
solo it works also great in FF https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/
When you open a new tab you may still get a white flash to prevent this you can use https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whiteslash-white-b...
Some people suffer from things like eye strain and this would improve the accessibility of the website.
Where are the studies about dark mode being a "gateway" to "useless stuff?"
“the typically higher luminance of positive polarity displays leads to an improved perception of detail.”
"in users with normal vision, light mode leads to better performance most of the time."
So why go for dark mode if legibility, detail perception and performance is lower?
EDIT: please note that "dark characters on light background" is the contrary of dark mode; in dark mode there are light characters on dark background.
Ok you're arguing that dark mode itself is useless. I don't know enough about it to have an opinion on it one way or another, I can find sources on the web going either way.
What I'm asking for is the evidence for the slippery slope implied by "gateway" whereby Hacker News staff will be more likely to add further "useless" features simply by having added one. Assuming for the sake of argument that it is useless.
I didn't say it's useless; there are use cases where dark mode is useful, e.g. "people with cataract and related disorders may perform better with dark mode" (from the Nielsen study). But it doesn't make much sense to add a feature just because it is fashionable, and not because it has a true advantage. If the people in charge of HN decided to change their site, there would be far more useful features than dark mode. I think that was the OP was referring to with "gateway to more useless stuff": if fashion and not usefulness is the number one priority, then a good product could render useless and development resources are wasted.
How can you browse a site called ‘hacker news’ and have no ability to ‘hack’ your way out of a simple problem? /s haha
* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/darkreader/
* https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dark-reader/eimadp...
You probably mean "habitually"; that's not what "instinctive" means.
/inzˈtiNG(k)tivlē,inˈstiNG(k)tivlē/
adverb
without conscious thought; by natural instinct.
I used it correctly, the idea is that I end up on HN without thought and the bright lights surprise me.
You should've pointed out 'built', I meant 'build'.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/octal-for-hacker-news/id130888...
My two gripes with the current HN styling are lack of dark mode and font size/text reflow. I have to constantly zoom and pan to read anything of consequence.
I'm sure one of the mods would take a look there.
Dimmed-dark mode for desktop and full-dark for OLED phones.
I really like the spartan construction of HN, though, and would be sad if it started to become a "Load 1MB of bootstrapped CSS and JS chrome manipulation software before you lose that 'X' in the address bar" site.
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
* {
color: #ccc;
background: black;
}
```
Really all you need for a rudimentary dark mode that automatically changes depending on your system preferences. Let's stop pretending this would take HN more than 30 minutes of dev time. Definitely would help improve accessibility.
Your browser will let you do this via user styles, plugins, user scripts, etc ad nauseam. The OS might even let you do it.
On a normal website, that might be a bit much to ask, but this is hacker news. Even so much as googling the term "dark mode" will give you a plugin that does exactly what you want.
Fix it with some CSS if it really bothers you.
/* Assume light mode by default */
@import 'light.css' screen;
/* Supersede with dark mode when applicable */
@import 'dark.css' screen and (prefers-color-scheme: dark);