It's Stack Overflow tradition to come together as a company and invest some actual engineering, product, design, and marketing staff time into an April Fool's joke each year. We've been doing it for the last several years, and as one of the 50 biggest websites in the world, we have the privilege of getting to amuse a lot of people with our annual joke.
Last year we redid the site in the style of a 1990s geo-cities page, and we served that up to everyone who visited starting April 1, regardless of whether or not they asked for it. This year is different. The world is facing what the United Nations calls its most challenging crisis since that body was formed in the aftermath of World War II. People around the world are suffering, and it doesn't feel like the right moment for a practical joke.
That said, with hundreds of millions of people stuck at home, there is a place in everyday life for entertainment, humor, and levity, something to take your mind off the pandemic, at least for a few minutes. And since we started working on our this well before this crisis took off, we thought we would should at least give anyone who is curious the option to check it out.
In classic Meta fashion, one of the first responses from our power users when we unveiled Dark Mode earlier this week was: ok, this is nice, but it's not dark enough.
Well, challenge accepted. For those of you who prefer your eye strain minimal and your website barely legible, we present - ULTRA DARK MODE. If you're interested in checking it out, enable it through your user preferences. It's available through midnight, April 5th, Eastern Standard Time.