Isn’t the dark mode something invented primarily as energy saving feature for OLED screens? I never even considered it to be protective for eyes.
Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
251–260 of 552 posts
Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
#252I'm squinting as I read this.
Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
#253Apparently light-on-dark is terrible if the person has astigmatism: the edges get very blurry and doubled. There was an article on HN about this, specifically about keynote slides. Also apparently “in Europe and Asia, astigmatism affects between 30 and 60% of adults” (says Wikipedia). I have it too, and couldn't figure out in the past why text sometimes looks horribly blurry and sometimes doesn't. With this knowledge…
Tried a lot of dark themes. I like it better, but with an astigmatism there’s no denying that I need glasses for dark mode but not for light mode. I hate wearing my glasses (20/20 in my good eye) so I recently made a switch to light mode. Everyone calls me a psychopath but I guess that’s what I get for doing what’s right for my case?
Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
#254Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyebal…
Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments.
Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you explain what you consider to be the difference between emitted and reflected light? I'm asking because in the models of global illumination that also handle emissive materials that I've worked with, there's literally no difference between whether a photon was emitted by a surface, or came from somewhere else and bounced off the surface. So I'm trying to understand if there's some fundamental property here (…
Emissive displays don't react to incident light in the same way as paper, even if they try. And they've been trying for a long time -- my grandmother had a TV from the 1970s with an ambient light sensor that would match the ambient color temperature.
They are always set too bright. I always wondered why are they simply not adaptive: you turn it on, and then set the brightness that you find comfortable. Then it adjust the brightness as ambient light changes by extrapolating from your chosen point.
Better systems could let you calibrate multiple points, so they would interpolate instead if extrapolate, but even a single point calibration would be amazing.
FWIW, I've tried dark mode and have to enlarge font sizes to read stuff compared to using very dim setting on my screens and light mode. I felt like I was in minority so didn't bother with exploring further.
But, I did realise and investigate blinking issue (I've got dry eyes, worse due to contacts and lots of screen time). I even have a few experiments in mind (like the typing break apps of old, I want my computer to trigger my blinking without adverse effects; whether it's by bluring content for a couple ms at a time to trigger eye refocus and blink, or whether it's something else, I still need to test it).
Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
#256Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyebal…
Science is not a faith based system. If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find. In the meantime, I will trust those scientific studies more than subjective opinions in hackernews comments.
> If you doubt about the rigor of some study, by all means point the errors you find.
Sampling. It probably feels good hand-waving away the problem of "does this study apply to everyone?" by introducing the "representative sample" construct, but it has its problems and I doubt they will be ever solved. You can't speak for everyone when you have several thousands samples -- out of ~8 billion people.
This is kind of akin to that artificially absurd example of "on average, every human on Earth has one testicle". (And don't get nitpicky here, please; it might be "median" or another term, and that's not the point.)
What your parent poster says is that this article is kind of hiding behind science to be able to claim a generalisation it makes is true. Which it still isn't. Most people I asked said they prefer dark mode. Some said they like light mode. This article changes none of that.
Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
#257I get pretty bad "burn-in" effects after reading text in dark mode and then looking away from the screen or at a light-mode site. The lines of texts then form a stripe pattern that's overlaid on everything that I see. Lasts about 1-2 minutes. Needless to say, I avoid dark mode in my job and I loathe websites that force it on me. The effect is worse the higher the contrast between dark background and bright text and t…
Exactly the same for me. I find it so uncomfortable that I won't use any darkmode interface and pretty much always shun darkmode web pages.
My worst experience was with jsFiddle. They switched to darkmode only, which ended my use of the site for a long time. I just recently found this GreaseMonkey script https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/403402-jsfiddle-light-them... that puts jsFiddle back to light mode.
Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
#258Wait. So. "Multiple studies show that light mode is better" trumps my actual experience, with my eyeballs, in my office environment? No. No it doesn't. 1. I don't have that much faith in scientists. Someone trying to p-hack their way to a publishable result that's sensational enough to advance their career is not going to produce good advice for me. 2. Even if they were perfect scientists, they're not using my eyebal…
Dark mode is a matter of demand, not if it's good for you. The real questions scientists should be asking why people want it in the first place. Other than that, I agree with your sentiment.
People wanted dark modes of websites since the dawn of the web itself. It's just that it was too inconvenient for companies to maintain at least two designs at the same time so they happily turned a blind eye to the requests.
Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
#259Apparently light-on-dark is terrible if the person has astigmatism: the edges get very blurry and doubled. There was an article on HN about this, specifically about keynote slides. Also apparently “in Europe and Asia, astigmatism affects between 30 and 60% of adults” (says Wikipedia). I have it too, and couldn't figure out in the past why text sometimes looks horribly blurry and sometimes doesn't. With this knowledge…
Light on dark is always a bit blurrier for dark on light, because your eyes will tend to defocus when looking at a darker scene to compensate for the overall lower amount of light. This also increases the effect of optical aberrations, so those with astigmatism and the like may be affected to the point that a lighter background becomes preferable.
Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you explain what you consider to be the difference between emitted and reflected light? I'm asking because in the models of global illumination that also handle emissive materials that I've worked with, there's literally no difference between whether a photon was emitted by a surface, or came from somewhere else and bounced off the surface. So I'm trying to understand if there's some fundamental property here (…
One of the more obvious differences is that paper is very close to a Lambertian reflector while LCD pixels are more directed. Hence the LCD viewing angle problem, though that gap is closing. Apart from that, I think it mostly comes down to the fact that an LCD pixel doesn't actually change it's reflected colour when it starts emitting light of a different colour. This means that incident light falling upon the pixel…
Ok, that makes sense. But does any of that have any bearing on eye strain? Because it sounds mainly like a color reproduction issue, which seems pretty orthogonal to the whole 'black text on white background vs white text on black background' debate.