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Comment by joemi | Hacker News Reader

I don't know that a website needs a dark mode. Does anyone really not visit a website because it doesn't match their desktop color theme? That seems absurdly picky to me.

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As a frequent user of dark mode, it isn't that at all. I don't care about things matching. I care about browsing in the middle of the night with the lights off and not killing my eyes. It doesn't have to be an all the time thing. It's just a matter of letting people tailor what is hitting their eyes to be appropriate to the surrounding ambient light level. Like high-end flashlights offering a red light mode. You acknowledge that it looks worse, but it also doesn't blind your users.

Thanks for clarifying.

I guess my real issue (which I forgot to mention previously) is: why is this something that the website needs to implement? Shouldn't a personal preference such as dark mode, like reader mode, be something browsers implement instead of the individual websites?

I don’t think most will outright not visit a site for not having dark mode, but it’s certainly good enough reason to avoid it and find alternatives that do have dark mode.

Agreed. It seems like a lot of people don't understand that dark mode is an accessibility issue for many people. If I couldn't use dark mode for the majority of my apps, I probably couldn't be a developer. Even with a monitor with a blue light filter and carefully adjusting the brightness and contrast to be as gentle on my eyes as possible, some days, my eyes are sensitive enough that even 15 minutes on light mode apps causes blurry vision and headaches. Dark mode I can use all day, no problem.

When I'm browsing on my bright desktop monitor in a dim room in the evening, and I click a link to a blinding white rgb(255,255,255) page, and reader mode doesn't work (which forces it dark), then I will sometimes click the back button to save my eyes, yes. I had to avoid HN in that situation for a while, until I got a custom stylesheet set up in Firefox.

I suspect that dark-mode-everywhere fans turn up their monitor brightness way too high and then complain about bright mode websites.

On the other hand, people accustomed to using bright mode turn down their monitor brightness and have no issues. As a rule, the white background should not be much brighter on a monitor than a piece of paper next to it.

This often results in brightness settings between 15-20%.

> I suspect that dark-mode-everywhere fans turn up their monitor brightness way too high and then complain about bright mode websites.

This weird contrived strawman scenario is an insult to people with disabilities.

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