Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

I'll never understand what happened about that time period. We went from the idea of "try minimize eye strain" to "fsck it! White looks great! Let's stare at light bulbs all day!". Grey backgrounds are a lot softer on the eyes.

I'm still running black text on light grey as my primary colour scheme for text editing since AmigaDOS 2.0 in the 90s. Seriously.

Emitted light isn't a problem per se, because reflected photons aren't somehow radically different from emitted ones. Color and brightness profile is the problem. On a display, you have to have high contrast and brightness for images (that have lots of darker areas), so the system interface is in turn tuned for this high brightness—and then you have to deal with bright white under text.

Note how text on e-ink is excellently readable but photos look like crap—since they aren't carefully selected and adjusted for the medium like in print.

On screens, black text on a-bit-gray-with-a-hint-of-red is better, like here on HN, though still not the same. I wonder if it's possible to get close to paper/e-ink colors on an LCD/OLED screen, or the backlight's color profile is too different (apparently LEDs emit narrow bands of wavelengths, which might be harsher for the eyes—while sunlight and incandescent lights have all or most of the visible spectrum).

"Dark Mode" needs to be implemented on the hardware side, not the software side.

At the end of the day the idea is to minimize brightness to:

-Save energy -Reduce Eye Strain -Reduce blue light emission

However, there is lots of research suggesting, that Dark Mode is more of a placebo than it actually works. There is already a set of new display technologies being developed that have the benefits of "Dark Mode" without the need of extra software, namley E-Paper technology and RLCD. Those are having several advantages over "old" Display technologies: https://imgur.com/a/oPhIu6A

Dark mode, blue light blocking glasses, etc. are just part of a bigger trend nameley the shrinking backlight industry in the display industry.

There are some intersting players developing backlight free screens already and in 5-10 years it will be the standard. Also in terms of screen economics, not even mentioning the material and energy savings.

The thing is, that our body/eye has been trained for thousands of years to work with reflective light (to see things/objects through the light reflection of the sun). The screen trend to look directly into backlight over the past decades is very unnatural to our body/vision and caused many problems. We need a screen technology that is very aligned with on how our body is designed and works.

Big players in the display market are realizing this and building alternatives. Big players include Sharp, Lenovo, BOE Technologies, JDI, Flex Lightning, Hisense, ONYX, Dasung etc.

You can read about screen alternatives (like eink and rlcd) here: https://www.reddit.com/r/eink/comments/h179j5/new_eink_alter...

PS: There was recently aready a Tablet released with the new RLCD screen technolgoy by BOE-Technologies, check here: https://boingboing.net/2020/06/11/tablet-with-high-refresh-r...

From the comments here I am amazed that many people don't know about brightness controls.

We don't listen to our music at 90+% volume always (and then complain that we need amute mode). That would be absurd since there is a volume control that can be used to set the sound output to a level that's just enough louder than the ambient noise level that we can hear as much detail of the music as we like.

For displays, we have brightness control which serves the same purpose.

With proper brightness adjustment, light mode can and should be very comfortable and natural in all but extremely dark environments.

After reading this article from Nielsen about the size of usability studies [1] their research credibility has gone down for me. According to the article, no matter the size of a user base:

"... the answer is simple: test 5 users in a usability study. Testing with 5 people lets you find almost as many usability problems as you'd find using many more test participants."

Oh wait, but my site has millions of users!

"Doesn't matter for the sample size, even if you were doing statistics."

Even if you were doing statistics? What does it even mean lol... it just sounds to me they want to justify whatever "studies" they've have in their library. I'd say, unless a Nielsen study is replicated and double checked, probably (pun intended :-p) their studies shouldn't be taken very seriously.

1: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-many-test-users/