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by dewey 3 hours ago
What's the thought behind having white and light grey text on a light grey background?
5 comments

There was an article a while back on HN about why web designers choose light grey on white background. Basically, it looks fine on their own monitor which has the contrast turned way up
Are the people here not looking at the article or bots? How on Earth does anyone read this?
Guessing it’s reading the system color scheme, because on my phone it’s white text on black.

(on iOS with dark mode enabled system wide)

Oh god, I just disabled dark mode and yeah, it looks awful. Looks great in dark mode though.
For me it’s Dark Reader (https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader) which can be installed on at least chrome and Firefox desktop browsers, and safari and Kagi on iPhones.

I use it to keep from getting flashbanged by my monitor. In this case it also fixes the above site, however some websites need the color filter mode changed to work better, so realistically I’m not ending up with less fixing of websites, just easier fixing.

I tweaked the css in my browser with developer tools.
It’s white text on black bg for me. But to answer your question- reader mode!
The css is ".prose-invert" and there's a ".prose" that looks better, I wonder if something threw a switch to make it "invert" when it should be ".prose" because you're right, this is unreadable as-is. Interesting read though.
Looks like “dark mode” implementation attempt which missed setting the background to black.
Its black background and white text on my screen. So either the OP saw the comments and fixed it or some people in this thread have weird settings. Or maybe I have weird settings...hmmm.
It’s changed since I checked. I think op fixed it.
Their dark mode is busted if you don't have JS enabled.