Human eye’s signal amplification curve is not linear. [1] You can’t convert an existing app to dark mode so much as building a new design for it, or it looks weird. Youtube’s Dark mode is an example of this uncanny valley.

Funnily enough, they themselves illustrated the issue with the first image on their post, in how weird the version on the left looks.

Besides - what we need isn’t a full dark mode, it’s an app that is built for the human eye. Dark mode is as extreme as staring into a white lightbulb all day, which is what the light mode is.

An example of this is Aether (disclosure: it’s a project I’m designing for: https://aether.app).

It’s designed for the ‘dark’ mode from scratch, or rather, it’s at 40% mode and it’s the only UI, so it aims to work well for both day and night. So we don’t have to go for the one or the other.

(I’m not sure about posting here since it’s a ‘Slack competitor’ and I don’t want to look like advertising, but hey, I guess it’s relevant)

[1] Contrast Threshold Curve of Human Vision https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Contrast-threshold-curve...