Even better: make the page background black. (I did notice testing of a "turn off the lights" button, but I no longer see it.)

Making the page black by default would make comments harder to read (imo). Then again, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

Change the CSS so that the comments are light colors on black. The black page makes the videos look better by tricking your eye into seeing more contrast.

yeah, that's what I meant. Maybe it's just me, but sites with white text on black background tend to hurt my eyes.

I do agree that black backgrounds are nicer for watching videos though.

It's definitely better with "turn off the lights", White is too bright for my eyes and adds distraction.

for greasemonkey users: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/49726 "turn off the lights" everywhere in youtube :)

Even better than that: http://quietube.com/

I was expecting a commentary on whether or not this was more green, so I was a little shocked seeing the spartan page that awaited.

I think it LOOKS a lot better. Without the benefit of commentary from the author, I can't say whether that was his intent or not. From the stills, I can say that it takes a little away from the video, in that it isn't clearly framed as the main content on the page, but I'm guessing that motion video would make that problem go away.

As a complete aside, I almost love the lack of commentary from the author. I certainly don't recommend it for every post, but it's almost like blog art, in that the resultant conversation is free-form.

"Never tell people what to think about stuff. Tell them about it and they will surprise you with their ingenuity." (To paraphrase Patton.)

Thanks for the thoughtful comment bmelton. I very deliberately restrained from commentary to focus all the attention on what I really wanted to say: the picture.

I tend to overindulge in commentary and analysis, but I believe that even more than as filters of news, the true strength of reddits is in analysis filtering.

I also submitted it to Reddit, where it's had some success too. http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8yhay/what_if_yo... (and has proved quite controversial.) But the most striking thing is the different quality and spirit of their comments to those from here.

Perhaps use white when viewing the video is playing normally on the site and go back to black when viewing in full screen mode.

white makes the video size quite irregular - and a lot more different from TVs (as far as I know, the background and frames are usually black). That is not an excuse on itself since it's a different media - but making it similar reduces the adoption barrier.

And it looks a lot tidier with a cleanly defined black square anyway, imho...

Meta-discussion: I feel like we should avoid single images if we want to avoid becoming yet another news aggregation site.

What's next, {"Top N [Nouns] to [Verb]" | N > 1}? :(

Do it like Vimeo.

Thanks for the headsup, I hadn't realized how elegantly Vimeo solves the problem.

Is the poster trying to make a point other than that it's more aesthetically pleasing to have it white?

does it need to have another point? are design matters unwelcome at HN?

I think it's more a matter of the author didn't include any commentary at all.

Seems like we didn't need any commentary to figure out and discuss the obvious question.