[santah]

I can tell you my reasoning.

While developing the dark mode theme for my mobile app, I experimented with pure black background first.

It looked off.

I couldn't figure out why it looked off (design wise, but also seemed weirdly hard to read) until I played with a bunch of other mobile apps with dark mode (which I used already and liked) and noticed their backgrounds are not black.

Then I just tried a couple of shades of "almost black" and the improvement was huge - easier on the eyes and more pleasurable to read.

I don't have a scientific explanation why this is the case, just I wanted to kinda directly answer the question with my anecdotal experience of why I do it.

[brtkdotse]

I’m a backend developer who’s trying to build up some rudimentary design chops and I’ve a consumed quite a few resources about design.

A lot of them say, pretty early on, “don’t use pure black or pure white, period”