[derefr]

1. Lowering brightness is basically lowering contrast; some people can’t read black-on-grey so well. A lot easier to read (bright-)white-on-black, while still not getting so much light exposure. (Have you tried reading a book on your phone in bed at night?)

2. The rise of dark-mode popularity seems to coincide with the availability of OLED screens, where black is a very, very dark color (i.e. what your screen looks like when it’s off) compared to what it is on LCD screens (where it’s just “what the backlight looks like when the LCD is trying its best to block it.”) In these cases, not only is #FFF-on-#000 is seemingly higher contrast than #000-on-#FFF, but also uses far less battery besides.

[Cyberdog]

> The rise of dark-mode popularity seems to coincide with the availability of OLED screens

"Dark mode" predates OLEDs by decades. Pretty much up until the first Macs, turning on a computer and getting something other than green, amber, or white text on a black background was an exception. Even then, code editors and terminal emulators on Macs and eventually Windows systems typically allowed for a dark mode, if only as a secondary option, well before anything other than CRT displays were practical.

[balaksakrionon]

Of course dark modes and dark themes have been around for a long time, but the user you are responding to specifically pointed to the 'rise of dark' mode, meaning the recent explosion in popularity