How a decade-old feature request made it to Medium

Hi Gencoo,

Over ten years ago, Medium user Naveen wrote a story about wanting a dark mode to better read stories on Medium, especially at night. (In classic Medium writer style, he designed a prototype himself and wrote about his process!) 

It was a great idea back in 2015, and since then, many other writers have taken to Medium to share their frustrations, experiences, and possible solutions for dark mode, not to mention the hundreds of readers who have sent in support tickets requesting it. 

Just one short decade later (!), we are happy to finally release dark mode on Medium. We hope it helps you enjoy more of the stories you read. 

How does it work?

If you already have dark mode turned on in your computer’s system settings, you should just be able to come to Medium.com and have it be in dark mode automatically—we’ll respect whatever your system’s settings are!

If you want to manually set Medium to dark mode, just head over to your Settings > Profile > Appearance > Toggle to Dark.

Any questions, issues, or feedback? Here’s where to let us know.

Behind the scenes

How did a decade-old request finally make it to users? We had a pretty full roadmap already, with reposting, the Editor Partner Program, AI opt-out, off-topic badges, table of contents, publication calendars, and more. 

We've had lots of passionate engineers and designers over the years that have wanted to tackle dark mode. This year, Christine Leverett found the space and the leverage with Claude Code to start building dark mode on her own in February 2026 between other projects. 

We knew it was going to be a hit (it has consistently been in one of our top three most-requested changes). Once there was momentum, the rest of the team picked it up and got it across the line in September.

If you want the longer story, Christine wrote up the whole process, including how she used Claude Code to manage scoping and ticketing, the guardrails that kept it from scope creep, and what’s next on our dark mode roadmap.