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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

Never understood the point of dark modes. Am I too old?

I like to read HN in the evening to unwind.

A bright white website after dark is a great way to disrupt your melatonin production and affect your ability to fall to sleep.

Dimming your phone brightness does not help sufficiently at all. In a dark room it's still like a relative flashlight in your eyes.

This should not be such a head scratcher to understand.

> A bright white website after dark is a great way to disrupt your melatonin production and affect your ability to fall to sleep.

I don't think that's true: https://time.com/5752454/blue-light-sleep/

This is a pet peeve of mine precisely because of the first line in that article:

> It’s become a virtually unchallenged piece of conventional wisdom that exposure to blue light—the type emitted by electronic device screens—is bad for sleep.

I read somewhere that blue light theory is a corporate bullshit financed by glasses makers to add 50$ by glass the sell you for a production cost of ) 50 cents.

A little like the 2000kcal by day by the agri-business lobby or the 1,5l of water by the water and soda business lobby.

Weird to exclude the ultimate form of corporate bullshit: vaccine makers (ie: corporations) are federally protected from any and all civil action against them. And they're one of the few drugs that are effectively mandatory for approximately 76 million children. Every single year. A literal money making machine. Protected by law. For the benefit of corporations.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/300aa-22#:~:text=....

Excuse me? For the benefit of corporations?

Polio used to be a thing in the western world, measles is coming back.

Mandatory childhood vaccines are for the benefit of children and society.

You’re also misrepresenting the NCVIA, the net result is arbitration that is easier to get a payout from as causality does not need to be proven.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Childhood_Vaccine_I...

The person you replied to said nothing about blue light but bright light.

Are you claiming bright light does not affect sleep?

You are too old to fall for bullshit.

The argument is that dark mode is needed to tackle the problem of blue light messing with your melatonin. However, this has not only never been proven, there are studies to the contrary:

https://time.com/5752454/blue-light-sleep/

Moreover, dark mode hurts my eyes and does the opposite of the other purported benefit.

Screens induce anxiety after long periods of usage, and it has nothing to do with the colour of the light. If you're reading your phone in bed before sleep, you have bigger problems.

I think it's largely a matter of taste, although there are people for whom bright interfaces cause accessibility issues.

Personally, I can't stand light-on-dark interfaces and turn them off wherever I can, although that may be because I have an astigmatism and dark interfaces supposedly cause problems (although I'm not convinced that's the reason in my case).

It's easier to your eyes at night or cloudy days.

I have my devices setup to switch automatically by hour of day. Sometimes I switch manually when I want to.

No. The primary benefit of "dark mode" is that it reduces eye strain for folks using their monitor at a brightness set too high for their environment. It can also just look cool, which is fine too.

Dark mode myths are summarized here: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dark-mode-chrome-android-ios...

>using their monitor at a brightness set too high for their environment

That's rather dismissive and ablest. I need high contrast. Dark background and bright text allow me to view the content. Screen brightness plays a role here too, but it's used to enhance the contrast, not compete against it.

> I need high contrast.

Me too! That's an independent issue, though.

Normal HN text has a contrast ratio of 19.34:1, which is great.

In contrast (ha ha), greyed-out text has a contrast ratio of 3.54:1, which is terrible.

So, HN should definitely fix text/background contrast ratios ASAP, whether or not they add a dark mode.

>So, HN should definitely fix text/background contrast ratios ASAP, whether or not they add a dark mode.

Agreed!

white backgrounds can be very hard to use or distracting to people with floaters in their eyes. dark mode makes concentration possible.

I could go either way, but switching back and forth is hard on me, so I tend to go light because the web is light. (Also because a lot of dark mode stuff tends to be crazy low contrast.)

I do however use dark mode when reading in bed and wish there was a pdf reader that did it.

Or... you could just switch lights on in your room and brightness of your monitor compared to the rest of your environment won't be that dramatical.

I understand the appeal of dark mode - to reduce eye strain, especially in dim environment. I suggest to not read your screen at all in the bedroom. It is the best down time for one's mind. Maybe I have undiagnosed eye problem. If the dark mode has a strong contrast with text, I see shadow/aura for minutes. It doesn't happen if the contrast is reduced nor in non-dark mode. I wonder if anyone has similar problem?

I have the same, and agreed on the advice of not using screens when you're trying to unwind.

No, I never understood the point either. But then I learned to code on a ZX Spectrum where everything was light mode so maybe that’s it.

A computer LCD is effectively a flashlight shining in your face. If you read in bed every night, it's jarring and annoying.

"No screens in the bedroom" is a quick and dirty way to improve insomnia.

the older i was getting the more i noticed that i can read light mode better than dark mode.

one day, when i was about 42 years old, sitting on a ferry on a very sunny day, i could hardly see my MacBook screen. switched to light mode and while the image was still a bit faint, it became totally readable.

I'm not using anything in dark mode ever since.

Maybe not old enough? ;-)

I use to prefer light mode exclusively, but my eyes feel more comfortable with dark mode as I get older.

I'm a graybeard, but I find dark modes to be much more difficult to read than light ones. I've never really understood the appeal of dark modes (outside of just aesthetics), but I do understand that they have an appeal to some.

Fair enough. For sure it's subjective factors (personal taste, etc) + objective ones (surrounding lighting, time of day, how long you've already been looking at a screen, and so on ...).

When you get older, and cataracts are a thing... white backgrounds blur and essentially "fill in" dark text, drastically lowering the perceived contrast ratio, and this makes it very hard to read.

The inverse is much easier to read for me.

No, maybe it's your eyes that are okay with non-darkmode. I am not using darkmode by reducing by using nightmode all the time but darkmode is totally a fine way to spend time in front of the computer if that makes you comfortable.

It's a way to forgo real customizability by limiting user choice to two colors.

Same. I am probably too old too, but it really doesn’t help me with anything…

I'm seeing a lot of visual snow with bright backgrounds, which is very annoying. Makes it close to impossible to focus.

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