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Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

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Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#241

Post by marcus_holmes »

Wait. 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 eyeballs. They're grading experiences on a bell curve and taking the median. We all experience things differently. This is the "fighter jet seat problem" - if you use the average then it fits no-one.

3. Even if I had average eyeballs (and I probably do), I doubt my situation is anything like the test subjects in the experiments. My home office isn't set up that well (I'm working on it).

4. My research, conducted using my eyeballs in my home office on my equipment, shows I prefer dark mode. I have tried both, and dark mode was the more comfortable experience. My experiment beats "multiple studies" for my situation. Yours may be different.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#242

Post by shirian »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #75
mixmastamyk wrote: post #8

No one seems to be mentioning the lighting of the room you're in, inside/outside, or the time of day. Ambient light is one of the primary factors that make light or dark mode better at a particular moment. See redshift to make light mode more tolerable at night.

F.lux deserves a mention

redshift is also an option.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#243

Post by zozbot234 »

skywhopper wrote: post #238
coldtea wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, it is. One thing is reading a newspaper in which text amounts to a good percentage of the available area, and the rest reflects ambient light, and a whole different thing is a screen with some text in the middle and the free area emitting white light right to my eyes, de facto saturating them. Photos are still photons. You can adjust the brightness of the monitor to be the same of a newspaper that reflects you…

But, you often can’t turn down the brightness that much. And anyway the contrast of monitors is many times worse than the contrast of a printed newspaper. Photons are photons, but a screen sends very different pattern of photons to your eyes than a newspaper.

Is this true? Printed newspaper is the crappiest kind of paper as far as contrast goes. Anyway OLED monitors have good contrast and their brightness can be arbitrarily adjusted.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#245

Post by teekert »

Well, I like Dark Mode on all the things. But there is no arguing that more light make my pupils contract and there for there is more depth of focus (like high F number in photography) and things are easier to read with a variety of eye deviations.

My wife always puts our TV in a very dim setting and complains about headache when I set it to max brightness. But I really get tired after watching a dim screen for 10+ min. I have aspherical lenses (different spherical radius in x vs y direction), not sure what the correct term is.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#246

Post by KineticLensman »

cnity wrote: post #214
aasasd wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 exce…

These are good points but miss an essential part of the story: reflected light almost by definition matches the brightness of the surrounding environment, meaning that the periphery is roughly the same brightness and white balance as the reading medium. If I look at my laptop on full brightness in a nearly pitch black room, it is far less comfortable to read than if I turned on a lamp. So there are two solutions to t…

> I go for the latter so I don't have to turn a lamp on

Yes. My use case is reading ebooks at night on a Kindle app in Dark Mode so that I don't disturb my partner who is trying to sleep.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#247

Post by pdimitar »

With a title like that, no productive discussion can be sparkled.

As other posters said and I am just going to repeat: the scientists can pull as many studies as they like. I find dark mode to be objectively better for me. It doesn't strain my eyes and is much more readable and quick to consume the content in 99% of the time -- there are rare exceptions but they are just that, rare exceptions.

Not sure how useful such an article is. It still reads like an opinion piece.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#248

Post by etiam »

Recall "Reading and Myopia: Contrast Polarity Matters" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20207577

In myopia the eye grows too long, generating poorly focused retinal images when people try to look at a distance. Myopia is tightly linked to the educational status and is on the rise worldwide. It is still not clear which kind of visual experience stimulates eye growth in children and students when they study. We propose a new and perhaps unexpected reason. Work in animal models has shown that selective activation of ON or OFF pathways has also selective effects on eye growth. This is likely to be true also in humans. Using custom-developed software to process video frames of the visual environment in realtime we quantified relative ON and OFF stimulus strengths. We found that ON and OFF inputs were largely balanced in natural environments. However, black text on white paper heavily overstimulated retinal OFF pathways. Conversely, white text on black paper overstimulated ON pathways. Using optical coherence tomography (OCT) in young human subjects, we found that the choroid, the heavily perfused layer behind the retina in the eye, becomes about 16 µm thinner in only one hour when subjects read black text on white background but about 10 µm thicker when they read white text from black background. Studies both in animal models and in humans have shown that thinner choroids are associated with myopia development and thicker choroids with myopia inhibition. Therefore, reading white text from a black screen or tablet may be a way to inhibit myopia, while conventional black text on white background may stimulate myopia.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#249

Post by Moru »

robotmay wrote: post #197

Dark modes are a choice. Light modes are a choice. Everyone is free to choose what they like, so trying to influence people one way or another, or criticising their choice, is unproductive. I live in Wales, a country where our default weather is "meh". I live on the dark side of a mountain. I work in a room with no external windows. Yes I use dark modes, and if you used light mode in my office I'd think you were a fu…

I agree with you that dark mode is a choice, one that I took many many years ago. My first assembler program was one that inverted the screen with a button press on my Atari ST. This so I could adjust for a dark or a light day. Now I'm using f.lux to turn down the blue light and to invert the screen if needed. Also some firefox plugin to make all homepages darkmode.

I have the ghosting halos too but this is something that you need to see an optician for. It can be corrected for but might have different sideeffects that you can or cannot live with :-) For me the world is slightly tipping over to the left if I use the glasses I'm supposed to use. And looking down and then up again is also very hard still after a year.

Re: Is Dark Mode Such a Good Idea?

#250

Post by trash_cat »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #241

Wait. 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.
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