First, stats that were passed around on social media last month indicate most people don’t use these settings (we’re talking less than 1%. I find this number hard to believe, but let’s pretend it’s accurate for the sake of this conversation). Second, if they have made a choice on this, they’re likely to have made it at the operating system level, and web developers have access to this choice via media queries should they need them.

So the user already picked if they want light or dark. What makes us think our sites are so special that the reader might want to change their minds just in our case?

Source: Nathan Snelgrove - The best dark mode toggle is probably none

I think there’s more nuance to this. For weblogs, I think I agree - mostly.

However, there’s nuance. Consider Semi Serious Labs. The toggle is a play on fun / seriousness. It doesn’t directly map to system preferences of the user.

In fact, I am actively relying on the mild frustration of a user who’s toggled dark mode in their system and will toggle the button prominently placed but be delighted by the whimsy.

Scale also changes the problem quite a bit. Imagine you are YouTube - adhering to the system won’t be enough. You have to account for people like me who’d still like YouTube to be dark even if I set the system as light.

And I am sure there’ll be at least a million people who prefer it the other way.

Scale problems are weird.

The good news is that it just means that we’ve just not solved it as a UX affordance yet. :) Here’s to more experiments on our path to determining the right mechanic.