Ask HN: What's your opinion on automatic light/dark mode switching on websites?

What’s your opinion on automatic light/dark mode switching on websites? Don’t you think it would be better to let the user choose the mode manually by clicking?

It's definitely a nice to have. My personal wordpress blog is white background, occasionally when I open it at night it blinds me.

Strong dislike. The way a site looks is very important for me in identifying what it is.

IMO if a website supports both light & dark themes, it should _by default_ switch automatically. If the site wants to allow overriding that, that's fine, but I hate having to constantly go into the settings of sites to switch it to "Use System Default" instead of "Light theme". Especially when sites don't store the data very long, or it's a site like AzureDevOps/Jira/etc which is deployed across multiple instances and therefore has a setting per-instance.

Depending on the device I'm using and where I am, I either let my computer automatically switch based on time of day, or keep it on dark theme. Sites that have manual toggles that don't default to respecting system settings make automatic system-wide dark/light mode an absolute pain.

If it is a new site, you can automatically choose.

If it is a site that already existed, do not make it automatically switch. Consider adding the option to switch instead.

If you insist nevertheless, then the ability to select the color scheme explicitly is absolutely mandatory.