[104/365] light mode
Apr. 14th, 2021 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistI've long been ranting about how normalized it is to denigrate the light theme of any app. Dark themes are, in the Very Online culture, declared objectively superior for readability and battery life when neither of these things is straightforwardly true. Battery is conserved by dark pixels on some kinds of phone screens, on some newer fancier phones. I don't imagine most people have ever thought about what kind of screen their phone has.
I know people who can't read dark text on a light background, and I can't read light text on a dark background. Light background with dark text is still the better default option. And I'm not just saying that because I'm partially sighted or anything: light text bleeds into a dark background in an effect called halation that affects not just me but, for example, people with astigmatism which is like 50% of the population.
It's fine to prefer or to need dark mode. That's not my problem: my problem is that it's normal and accepted to express a real hostility toward light themes. It's shockingly visceral and of course deeply ableist.
Not to mention just...peculiar! I will never understand the animosity toward things like when milk should be added to tea or whether jam or cream goes on the scone first. If it's not my tea, my scone, my programs and apps, I cannot work up a single fuck to give about this! Your opinion doesn't need to be universal to be valid!
The sweeping judgments of light themes quickly spill over into questioning the existence and qualities of people who use light themes, which is a hell of a thing to read as someone who needs them. I've seen people say things like "only psychopaths use light themes," I guess to unlock the double-ableism bonus!
Mistaking aesthetics for objectivity has had all kinds of weird impacts on me when trying to use apps on my own phone. A couple weeks ago I opened a spreadsheet only to be met with a message box I couldn't read because it was in dark mode! I had to get my phone to OCR it. It said "Dark theme has been automatically applied to your spreadsheet" and went on to tell me which menus I had to navigate through to change it back to light theme. Which I had to do, all in dark theme of course. It was a nightmare.
It was particularly infuriating because the message box seemed to be specific to users who'd had light theme before -- this was acknowledgement of a change, and the directions for returning to light theme imply the expectation that some people will want or need to do so, even as these directions were made difficult to follow. If everyone has to be forcibly changed to dark theme, you could at least make the message box saying so appear in light theme! And rather than making us dig through dark menus to switch it back, why not have a big "restore light theme" button at the bottom of the message? But then, that'd just lead to the question of "why not just leave people's themes alone altogether?"
The inadequate answer I found to that last question, when I finally got through the menus to re-activate light mode, was that the avaliable options were Light, Dark and the one that was selected was Battery Saver. So because I limit battery-draining settings (that I mostly wouldn't want anyway!) on my elderly phone with its poor battery, that apparently means I've given up any ability to consent to dark mode.
But that might not even be the most irksome. A couple weeks before this, I opened Discord and was met with a list of changes from an update it'd just had. One of them was "Light theme loading screen improvement...for all 7 light theme users on Android." I had to read it a few times just to understand it; I thought I'd missed something. But...no, this update was just being mean about me.
Discord is such an accessibility nightmare anyway that I barely use it, and thus miss out on the social aspects of virtual film nights and club nights, a real shame at a time when virtual things are practically the only option for the socializing I desperately need.
Discord apparently has form for being nasty and begrudging to its light theme users: they deleted light theme as an April fool's joke a couple of years ago. And the run-up to that seems to be the source of a lot of the light-mode animosity I'd noticed elsewhere on the internet, even before I tried to use Discord.
What had happened with Discord seems to be something I'd independently deduced: after dark mode was introduced, something -- the novelty or the aesthetic or the cultural assumptions of its superiority or whatever -- made it almost ubiquitous. Hardly any app developers use light mode, so it becomes a grudging afterthought, so it looks bad or lacks features compared to dark mode, so people don't use it -- and they think anyone who does use it is baffling since it looks so bad -- and the resulting lack of users justifies further neglect and reluctance to develop light themes. And so the terrible cycle continues.
Until you get to the point where the people writing up release notes are openly mocking light theme users for being a minority.
And that's actually where today's story begins! Because when I complained about this on Mastodon a month ago, a friend said she was going to change to light theme in solidarity, because she wanted to up the numbers. I immediately forgot all about this afterwards, but despite saying at the time she might have to switch back since it seemed so bright, she must not have because today she talked about having to softblock someone from her lewd alt because they greeted her Discord screenshot of a "boobs" channel with "ewwww, light mode." Imagine! Getting to see and hear about someone's naughty goings-on and making use of that privilege just to shit on light mode! The mind boggles, honestly.
She told them that she's using light mode in solidarity with a friend who needs it for accessibility reasons. (Which is hilarious because, having totally forgotten her telling me this same thing a month earlier, I was so excited and flattered to hear that this was about me!)
I'm sad the casual denigration of light mode has extended even to someone who's only using it out of spite after the unnecessary mean release notes. But I'm not surprised. Of course the only response to her angry, educational reply about solidarity and accessibility and the nastiness of Discord about this was just "it was a joke, I don't care what you use" but people can't always make themselves stop caring before they make these "jokes" can they. And like I said, the denigration of light-theme users plays a part in this circuit of systemic ableism and that works just as well whatever the motivation of individual "jokes" happens to be.
I know people who can't read dark text on a light background, and I can't read light text on a dark background. Light background with dark text is still the better default option. And I'm not just saying that because I'm partially sighted or anything: light text bleeds into a dark background in an effect called halation that affects not just me but, for example, people with astigmatism which is like 50% of the population.
It's fine to prefer or to need dark mode. That's not my problem: my problem is that it's normal and accepted to express a real hostility toward light themes. It's shockingly visceral and of course deeply ableist.
Not to mention just...peculiar! I will never understand the animosity toward things like when milk should be added to tea or whether jam or cream goes on the scone first. If it's not my tea, my scone, my programs and apps, I cannot work up a single fuck to give about this! Your opinion doesn't need to be universal to be valid!
The sweeping judgments of light themes quickly spill over into questioning the existence and qualities of people who use light themes, which is a hell of a thing to read as someone who needs them. I've seen people say things like "only psychopaths use light themes," I guess to unlock the double-ableism bonus!
Mistaking aesthetics for objectivity has had all kinds of weird impacts on me when trying to use apps on my own phone. A couple weeks ago I opened a spreadsheet only to be met with a message box I couldn't read because it was in dark mode! I had to get my phone to OCR it. It said "Dark theme has been automatically applied to your spreadsheet" and went on to tell me which menus I had to navigate through to change it back to light theme. Which I had to do, all in dark theme of course. It was a nightmare.
It was particularly infuriating because the message box seemed to be specific to users who'd had light theme before -- this was acknowledgement of a change, and the directions for returning to light theme imply the expectation that some people will want or need to do so, even as these directions were made difficult to follow. If everyone has to be forcibly changed to dark theme, you could at least make the message box saying so appear in light theme! And rather than making us dig through dark menus to switch it back, why not have a big "restore light theme" button at the bottom of the message? But then, that'd just lead to the question of "why not just leave people's themes alone altogether?"
The inadequate answer I found to that last question, when I finally got through the menus to re-activate light mode, was that the avaliable options were Light, Dark and the one that was selected was Battery Saver. So because I limit battery-draining settings (that I mostly wouldn't want anyway!) on my elderly phone with its poor battery, that apparently means I've given up any ability to consent to dark mode.
But that might not even be the most irksome. A couple weeks before this, I opened Discord and was met with a list of changes from an update it'd just had. One of them was "Light theme loading screen improvement...for all 7 light theme users on Android." I had to read it a few times just to understand it; I thought I'd missed something. But...no, this update was just being mean about me.
Discord is such an accessibility nightmare anyway that I barely use it, and thus miss out on the social aspects of virtual film nights and club nights, a real shame at a time when virtual things are practically the only option for the socializing I desperately need.
Discord apparently has form for being nasty and begrudging to its light theme users: they deleted light theme as an April fool's joke a couple of years ago. And the run-up to that seems to be the source of a lot of the light-mode animosity I'd noticed elsewhere on the internet, even before I tried to use Discord.
What had happened with Discord seems to be something I'd independently deduced: after dark mode was introduced, something -- the novelty or the aesthetic or the cultural assumptions of its superiority or whatever -- made it almost ubiquitous. Hardly any app developers use light mode, so it becomes a grudging afterthought, so it looks bad or lacks features compared to dark mode, so people don't use it -- and they think anyone who does use it is baffling since it looks so bad -- and the resulting lack of users justifies further neglect and reluctance to develop light themes. And so the terrible cycle continues.
Until you get to the point where the people writing up release notes are openly mocking light theme users for being a minority.
And that's actually where today's story begins! Because when I complained about this on Mastodon a month ago, a friend said she was going to change to light theme in solidarity, because she wanted to up the numbers. I immediately forgot all about this afterwards, but despite saying at the time she might have to switch back since it seemed so bright, she must not have because today she talked about having to softblock someone from her lewd alt because they greeted her Discord screenshot of a "boobs" channel with "ewwww, light mode." Imagine! Getting to see and hear about someone's naughty goings-on and making use of that privilege just to shit on light mode! The mind boggles, honestly.
She told them that she's using light mode in solidarity with a friend who needs it for accessibility reasons. (Which is hilarious because, having totally forgotten her telling me this same thing a month earlier, I was so excited and flattered to hear that this was about me!)
I'm sad the casual denigration of light mode has extended even to someone who's only using it out of spite after the unnecessary mean release notes. But I'm not surprised. Of course the only response to her angry, educational reply about solidarity and accessibility and the nastiness of Discord about this was just "it was a joke, I don't care what you use" but people can't always make themselves stop caring before they make these "jokes" can they. And like I said, the denigration of light-theme users plays a part in this circuit of systemic ableism and that works just as well whatever the motivation of individual "jokes" happens to be.