Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me neither. It's a running joke of sorts.
Given how pedantic and cargo-culty the HN community can be about even the tiniest detail of the layout here, it doesn't surprise me that the mods don't make it a priority. The arguments about implementation details and edge cases would be ceaseless, and people would clutch their pearls about HN "turning into Reddit." Also dark mode seems way too modern a feature for a forum whose entire aesthetic is frozen in the 199…
Later, I used Netscape. Some of the more prominent settings[1] were for default colors: For text, links, visited links, and background. I very quickly made it white on black (but kept the blue/purple links unchanged).
But that was just me attempting to stick to my own familiarities.
For most others, the default background in those days was also not white; it was instead grey (#c0c0c0, [2], [3]).
Backgrounds defaulted to grey with Netscape all the way to the end, with Netscape Communicator 4.8 still defaulting to grey [4] at its 2002 release. Mosaic was also consistently grey [except for on the Macintosh], and so was IBM's WebExplorer (the forgotten independently-developed web browser that shipped with their forgotten desktop operating system).
Even Internet Explorer remained grey by default until the release of version 4, in the last half of 1997. [5]
But you're right, of course: There's no need for dark (or grey) mode here on HN. It's a simple-enough affair for a person of sufficient wit to change it to whatever they want, in-browser, here in 2025.
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[1]: https://www.ou.edu/class/webstudy/n4/old/N_Link_Appearance.h...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20302205
[3]: https://scholar.lib.vt.edu/reports/soasis-slides/colors.html
[4]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Netscape_Communicato...
