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Comment by imwally | Hacker News Reader

I’m not a big fan of dark mode and I seem to be in the minority these days. Probably 99% of my colleagues at work use dark mode and when I screen share I get the usual “ah, my eyes!”

The interesting thing is, I’ve noticed when I read white on black and look elsewhere I see horizontal lines in my vision. So really I’m the one who should be shouting about their eyes. Maybe that’s just me, though?

I guess I want my computing experience to be like that of reading a book. Not sure I’d like white text on black paper.

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I find dark mode incredibly straining in most daytime and office situations, particularly with glossy screens. Do use it exclusively in dark environments though.

The ‘anti light-mode’ sentiment has been around for more than a decade, but the reason why it’s not default is because it doesn’t suit the majority of users’ needs or use cases.

Anecdotally, I’ve found that the strongest proponent of dark mode in my professional career tended to be people who worked exclusively at night, or those who aspired to emulate the ‘late night hacker’ trope.

Your team might be an anomaly. I get the sense that dark mode people are a vocal minority. I see people share their screen constantly at work and I can probably count on one hand the number of people I’ve seen with dark mode. Actually, I can only recall 2, and one of them was an intern from 10+ years ago.

If the majority was using dark mode, I’d imagine we’d see operating systems show dark mode as their default screenshots and ship as the default. We don’t see that.

When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.

> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.

Interesting how experiences differ. I've found dark mode contrast to generally be a bit better than that of light mode because for some reason designers tend to employ a wider spread of colors with a higher delta between the lightest and darkest in those, whereas light mode themes tend to be stark white and two grays tops with those grays barely getting used at all.

So for example it's common for group boxes in dark mode to get a dedicated background color where under light mode they won't have a background and all and fall through the the parent's white background, causing content to all kind of blur together.

> When I’ve tried dark mode I had a big issue when the contrast. Everything became harder to discern, which I found more difficult for my eyes.

I use pure 000000 and FFFFFF on an OLED monitor, contrast is fantastic. I agree though on general lackluster gray-based dark modes, they can be worse to read.

Yeah, I also see the horizontal lines, but only after a while of reading white on black on my phone. But on any devices white on black text appears to me slightly blurry or doubling.

This is also my experience. Do you have astigmatism?

Yes, I do!

Yep

I also see the horizontal lines.

I guess it's like looking at a slatted window blind with a sunny day behind it, when you look away your eyes will see the remnants of the bright lines. Whereas if you're staring at a bright surface (a screen on light mode), the entire scope of vision is dimmed...

The only time I preferred light mode was as when I was on vacation in Florida and worked out of a sun room. I find myself normally working in low light environments which makes dark mode better overall. But it doesn’t have to be black background in fact I like the other “dark themes” that are darker shades of blue

I definitely feel that during the day but have the inverse experience when the sun has set (light mode feels unbearable after dark).

I like my code editor to respect my OS which automatically changes from light to dark mode when the sun sets.

Even with flux? Shifting the white point is far more comfortable than dark mode for me. In fact it also matches with the ambient lighting, 4000-6000k during the daytime then 2000-2700k after sunset.

Get checked for astigmatism. 100% you have it

There can be other causes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_palinopsia. I think mine is caused by HPPD, but I can't say for sure

same here. sometimes it makes me feels guilty for using light mode. Maybe we should yell out something like "hold-on can't see anything"

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