Dark Mode Sucks

>evan, I agree.

Hate the dark.

Dark is hard to see. Light is easy to see. I use light at every opportunity. Dark partially grew out of an interest in saving battery power on early oled screens, but dev's noticed a certain demographic drawn towards the dark look.

I used to be one of those setting everything to dark mode, custom CSS and all, but I am now cured. It was a difficult time as my eyesight was rapidly deteriorating to the point that I thought that I would need to change carers to something not involving computers. I am so thankful that it is over. The source of the problem was that I had been consistently over-prescribed by different optometrists. I don't blame them, but something must be off in how they were trained. To avoid this issue, do not use regular progressive lenses in your eyeglasses. Instead ask for an "intermediate distance" formula optimized for the typical distance between your eye and the computer monitor. In practice this is a depowered formula supposed to be used only for computer used, but I used it all the time. On my next checkup my official formula had decreases confirming that it was too strong in the first place. I know don't have to use dark mode, and my vision is much better in general (I'm in my 50s). And don't over use your phones!!

Dark-mode and light-mode are both so popular as user preference, that apps and sites should make sure at least stock light and dark modes work well, out of the box. Noticeable examples of needing improvement:

* Default light and dark themes of programs/apps and sites that have illegible low-contrast color combinations. Very common, sometimes within themes they control entirely but apparently never tested both light and dark themes. (For example, the non-customizable foreground color a calendar program users to indicate task priority doesn't change when the theme changes the background color to dark. Or the terminal app thinks that yellow is a foreground color to use for highlighting warnings, and apparently the author has never heard of terminal windows with white backgrounds.)

* Bluesky's delayed page-loading full-screen interstitial of small butterfly logo against white backdrop, rendered when they know the session is in dark mode. If you've in dark mode in a dark room, winding down for bed at night, this is awful. I occasionally notice lesser problems like this with streaming video UIs, but not as consistently jarring/blinding as Bluesky. (Almost as awful as the movies/shows on home video streaming services that throw in gratuitous strobe light scenes. If it doesn't give the customers seizures, it stil can't be good for their sleep cycle. At least Bluesky's unnecessary sudden blinding white doesn't strobe.)

Yes, but we could at least have good discussion prompted by that, until someone flagged the article.

I wasted my time typing a constructive comment, while the article was flagged in the interim. Now I'm just going to close HN and not waste more time.

Maybe I'm weird, but I just stick with whatever the default is per app. Discord and Spotify and MetaFilter dark, Slack and Gmail and HN light. It feels strange switching either to the non-default, but have no preference for either as a whole.