Dark mode. Sure, Dark Reader exists but many mobile browsers don't support it.
Annoyingly enough it's been talked about for years but it never gets implemented, despite only three colors really needing a swap: background to dark sepia or just dark gray, and text to white and off-white.
You need to add controls, as some people would like it set up differently than their OS. You need to store the setting. You need to consider people without accounts. You need to put a bit on thought into the color scheme, as this website is after all known for its color. In the end, many people will complain, regardless of how well you do.
I can virtually guarantee that the amount of people getting annoyed at being flashbanged by HN is larger than the amount of people that would complain about a dark mode.
For users without an account you just stick to prefers-color-scheme. For users with an account you add a setting 'disable dark mode'
Dark Reader has autodetection so those users won't be a problem either.
And if you really wanna keep to the identity of the site, the top bar doesn't even really need a color swap.
It really is less of a conundrum than you think.
> You need to add controls, as some people would like it set up differently than their OS.
The Browser also has controls. Good Browsers let you set your browser-wide choice differently from your OS-wide choice. Great Browsers let you pick per-site overrides directly, as a standard user setting in a consistent location in browser controls. I realize a lot of UX designers have come to much prefer the "add more controls" approach over the "teach a person to fish" / understand how your OS and browser controls work as the user of the site approach. I realize why a lot of UX designers will always prefer that approach, because teaching people is hard and it is easier to cut complaints off at the pass than answer complaints with "use your browser's settings".
But seriously, it should be fine to release a dark mode in 2025 that only responds to `prefers-color-scheme: dark` and leaves it to users to understand their OS and Browser tools. It irks me a lot more when sites like Wikipedia and Bing and Google ignore `prefers-color-scheme: dark` by default and makes you dig for some dumb website-specific control (that's in a different place on every website) just to set it to whatever they call "System default" that means "trust the Browser's prefers-color-scheme, I know what I'm doing". UX designers have taken something that should be natural and automatic and made it more complex and more confusing just because a small handful of users complain that they don't understand their OS and Browser Settings tools.
If only colour swap is required, can you use a Greasemonkey script?
> Dark mode.
The idea of "Dark mode" as a "feature" annoys me more than it probably should. Because it highlights how proper separation of content and presentation has been ruined by the so-called modern web, by modern web devs that don't get it.
The website is supposed to provide content, not presentation. Presentation is a user-agent feature. If you want to read a site with bright yellow font on a purple background, that should be your decision and yours alone. Configure your user agent with that color scheme and done.
By hardcoding presentation into the content, the "modern" (regressed) web removes functionality from the user. So now the user is relegated to begging the developers to implement particular color schemes like "dark mode", which doesn't make any sense.
The web was like that for about the first 10 minutes. In 1996, the "modern" web accepted that web pages were almost always going to incorporate appearance and made it sane by standardising CSS.