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Comment by legerdemain | Hacker News Reader

I disagree completely. I want dark mode as the default everywhere. White on black is superlatively legible. Black text on a white background is not. Dark themes reduce eye strain and glare in low-light environments. Dark themes lower screen power consumption. Dark themes are calming. Dark themes invoke a perception of "premium" and "adult," whereas a light theme is often garish, cheap, and juvenile. Dark themes allow me to express the darker aspects of my nature. Dark themes align with my view of the world as a pit of beautiful despair. More dark themes, please!

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Those are all your opinions, presented as if they're hard facts. Let me tell you how this plays out for me.

When I visit a dark theme website, all is good for maybe half a minute or so. As you say, less light hitting your eye is somewhat pleasant. But then, somehow, the eye strain starts. My eyes seems to defocus, and it becomes harder to make out letters. I have to squint, and after maybe a minute that no longer helps. If I don't stop reading then, but keep going for a few more minutes it gets progressively harder. Then when I look away, I am blind.

No kidding, can't see a thing, just a grey blur everywhere. Takes several minutes to get back to normal.

I have no idea how common this is. I asked an optometrist about this once, and she looked at me like I was from Mars.

Dark themes are not the solution for everyone, and default dark themes everywhere is my personal nightmare.

> My eyes seems to defocus, and it becomes harder to make out letters.

I don't understand the inner workings, but I get the impression that there is some fuckery going on when keeping the same distance to the screen and heavily diminishing the amount of light reaching the eyes. There may be a threshold (varying among individuals) beyond which the pupils become too open to clearly focus on the text.

I have a slight photosensitivity and most outdoors daylight conditions are too much for my naked eyes, but many dark UIs are too high or too low contrast and feel worse for extensive reading than their light counterparts in a screen matched to a moderately illuminated room (and this also also includes changing screen settings to match environment light conditions when switching between light/dark themes, not just trying with the same settings).

This leads to a life where my screens are stoically dimmed way past their sweet spot most of the time. Colors suck a bit, but at least I can always focus on light UIs without strain and it avoids text persistence (burn-in) in the eye.

Lately I'm trying GitHub Dark (not Dark Default) in VSCode for dim environments at night; it's the lesser offender while retaining some legibility/contrast. Dark Discord seems bearable for a while, too.

The problem is that for a lot of sites white on black is light gray on dark gray.

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