Contrived: deliberately created rather than arising naturally or spontaneously. Synonym: deliberate

created or arranged in a way that seems artificial and unrealistic. Synonym: forced

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People can do anything they want with their websites. I'm not anyone who sets global policy on what your website should do.

But there's nothing contrived about the comment. It's an unplanned, spontaneous thought based on first-hand experience.

I spent nearly six years homeless. I'm quite open about that. I still blog about homelessness.

I spent a lot of time online while homeless. This was written about me:

http://alexandralindelof.com/story-package/

I'm aware of that, but images on a website being desaturated or having a dark background doesn't seem like it would help. (I do agree with your appeal to those who are sensitive to bright lights, FWIW. It's just that this one sounds like a bit of a reach.)

If you are illegally camped in a dark field and your phone, tablet or laptop is the only source of light, bright white images emit much more light that can give away your position than dark ones.

IIRC, the two primary things we did to conserve battery power were 1. Avoid certain games and 2. Turn down screen brightness.

In ordinary usage, the screen on our tablets was typically the biggest drain on the battery. This was especially true for tablets with a large screen.

I don't have (anec)data specific to dark mode on websites and power usage. I just know that using our devices carefully was the difference being kept occupied for three or four hours until we could sleep or running out after an hour and having nothing to do but talk, which is not a stealthy activity.

"As an example, one commercial QVGA OLED display consumes 0.3 watts while showing white text on a black background, but more than 0.7 watts showing black text on a white background, while an LCD may consume only a constant 0.35 watts regardless of what is being shown on screen."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMOLED

The citation was from 2009. I expect, or rather hope, that things have improved. Interesting link, by the way, and very useful to add to the discussion.

So it depends on the display and may become a thing of the past.

That's really good info.