Ask HN: Dark Mode for HN is overdue | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Dark Mode for HN is overdue

51 pointsflorians49 comments

It’s 2025. HN lights up a dark room like a flashlight. Can we add a few lines of CSS to support dark mode? 5 years ago and I believe the alligator needs to move https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23197966

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Personally, I think dark mode is unnecessary feature creep. But it's also because I never use it and hate it when it's the default and I have to go hunt for the hidden button to switch it off: I need lots of light, otherwise letters get blurry for me, so I'm just another biased human being =)

Dark mode is also about accessibility for some visually impaired users

https://drgrizz.xyz/dark-mode.html

TIL.

I'd also add for the defense of white themes that with OLED panels showing up everywhere (where dark pixels are effectively shut off), that a dark BG with light FG/text has quite a bit of a "halo" effect on the letters and this fuzziness wreaks havock on my eyesight/fatigue.

Yes I know. Like I said, I'm just another biased user with their particular type of vision impairment ;) It's impossible to please everyone

I see a lot of people in here saying no. Just don’t use it if you don’t want it. It’s really that simple. This is a very simple feature request for HN.

https://darkreader.org/

Darkreader plus 150-200% zoom and you have something pretty usable on hidpi displays. You could always try making your own frontend for HN, it's pretty trivial :)

Allow access to everything on all websites? Absolutely not.

It's sad that everyone has to run around implementing hard-coded "dark themes" 30 years after computers users could routinely set up system-wide color schemes themselves.

The whole point here is for websites to respect those user configured system-wide color schemes.

This is why prefers-color-scheme exists.

I understand. The elimination of the color-scheme editor from Windows and the ascendancy of devices that never had one has allowed designers to get away with defective (AKA incomplete) color overrides on Web pages and in software.

It’s browsers that ignore user choices.

They also are constantly moving targets for any web designer who tries to keep up…

I've been actively developing https://hcker.news, a replacement for the hacker news frontpage. It does its best to be familiar with the hn reading experience while adding a lot of missing features.

A lot of people use it on the regular and I have been lucky to have a lot of their feedback since I shared it here a few months ago.

I just added support for comments too! I'd love to know what folks think.

It's even brighter than the original.

Th-thanks ...

haha, i can't believe i forgot to mention you can turn on a dark mode. one of the missing features i added was to make things dark, which was supposed to be the point of the comment.

You have to open up the settings drawer and you can have it match your system scheme.

You are allowed to reduce your display brightness. I run my iPhone at the lowest possible setting at night (right now). Try it sometime. It might seem really dim at first but your eyes will adjust in a few minutes.

I think dark mode can be deceptive. Blazing hot white text on a pitch black oled background is like visual caffeine to me. I would not want to be staring at this if I was adjacent to bedtime.

Why doesn't HN support reading mode in Firefox, anyway?

Dimming doesn't solve much.

I won't dim screen every time I switch apps. It doesn't work when you use multiple apps side-by-side (which is nowadays a thing even on mobile/tables). It doesn't bring relief to people that have visual problems that can be fixed with dark mode (I am super annoyed by floaters that I don't notice 95% of the time. Except from very bright websites like HN).

> Blazing hot white text on a pitch black oled background is like visual caffeine to me.

Same thing for me and my vision - I just can't use pure dark themes. But there is so much middle-ground here.

The display brightness doesn’t go dim enough

I‘d also like a dark mode.

And: on iOS you can reduce the white point quite a bit which makes the display appear very dark indeed. You can even tie it to a shortcut which is quite handy

On iPhone/iPad, use the zoom accessibility feature set to 1x but with the darken filter on.

On Mac, there's an app old app that still works called Shady to get darker than normal.

I triple click my power button and it inverts colours, does the job reasonably enough.

iPhone min brightness setting still flashes the screen at max brightness, just at a slower rate so you perceive it as less bright, but it’s actually still burning your retina at max light output of the OLED on each flash.

Look it up.

One can always add those stylesheets themselves in their browser, or through the uBlock Origin extension. Otherwise (one of the many darkmode extensions) "Dark Reader" is available for Safari (macOS and iOS), Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and Mozilla Firefox (Windows, macOS, Android). On iOS you can also use Firefox (or Brave) that has builtin darkmode for all websites.

Just use a browser that lets you apply a custom style sheet and apply one.

I think the point is that it's a very simple interface. I'm in the camp of it ain't broke, so let's not fix it.

It gives you an API, doesn't get in your way if you wanna add CSS. Everyone is free to consume HN as they they please, adding extra cruft really isn't in the spirit.

I’m not sure a couple of lines of CSS really counts as “extra cruft”

Basically this and prefers-color-scheme: dark https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23202647

This. Thanks for illustrating how little is required for a basic dark mode support.

This was my first dark mode: https://www.dosforum.de/viewtopic.php?t=12253 Been there, done that. A black background is generally more tiring for the eyes. A black background means less light. Less light means the eye's aperture has to open wider. A wider aperture means less depth of field. Less depth of field means the eye has to work harder to focus. There are reasons for using a black background on a mobile phone, as it can save energy. But for any device that has a power adapter, a black background is simply self-flagellation.

It depends on the environment. Of course, reading HN in a dark room will never be pleasant. But looking into a bright white flashlight can really hurt. Good dark modes are not simply black/white but make use of the right font weight and color to reduce glare.

I put my phone’s brightness down to minimum at night. Nonetheless I use HN purposely as a dim light when the phone’s torch would be too bright and a beige glow does the job splendidly. (Typically, when I’m moving around the house late at night and everyone else is asleep - when pitch black the torch is too extreme.)

That said, given the amount of time I spend reading on the site I do wish there was a dark mode option.

This is the dark mode ublock I use [1] along with a few other uBlock+HN related things. Adjust as needed. I assume most browsers have support for uBlock.

[1] - https://mirror.newsdump.org/hn-ublock-colors-other.txt

While there are options, and pretty much all of them mentioned several times here (going the darkreader route myself) - it is no complex task for someone who has done CSS before, on a site like HN.

  ! dark mode (adapts to your browser preference)
  news.ycombinator.com##html:matches-media((prefers-color-scheme: dark)):style(filter: invert(90%) hue-rotate(180deg))

If you're on firefox, this extension is lovely https://www.modernhn.com/

Use https://darkreader.org/

Automagic dark mode on every site

i'm sure you know you can add custom css sheets ? through bookmarklets

just go to https://hacked.stream if you need it, you'll still need to upvote via HN interface until proxy is implemented

Visiting this site on mobile is not great. A good portion of the screen is covered by a sticky header and there is no underline or feedback when a link is clicked. Additionally, it is missing the story position and with infinite scroll there is no way to differentiate whether you are looking at the 10th story or the one in the 100th position.

Octal is great on iOS.

I recently built a site for myself which defaults to dark mode and shows me the top posts from HN, Lobste.rs, Tildes, SlashDot, Bear and a few tech/STEM related subreddits in a time-ordered list. Maybe you will find its useful:

https://limereader.com/

Love the vibe!

Thank you!

No, dark mode is redundant and makes sites feel too new-agey.

I checked my calendar. It didn't say anything about dark modes. What does the current year have to do with anything?

Nice joke. I'll steal it

I use octal app for this

A quote from the post you mentioned > I don't want my eyes to burn when I'm browsing HN at night on my phone

Is it just me who feels completely opposite? I struggle to read dark, text-heavy websites for the exact same reason.

Also, if dark mode ends up happening, please put the checkbox on the account page, the UI is busy enough :)

No. It's not just you.

I have nothing against dark mode in principle, but please don't make it the default. Respect the user's preference.

Or, at the very least, don't use white on black. Soften the contrast so that, if you force me to read it, it's not burned into my vision.

The problem is that most sites implement dark mode wrong with too much contrast. It doesn’t work if you make it “black”. It’s more about dimming the lights.

Reading dark pages will never be as good as reading in a well lit room. But there are ways to make it work.

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