Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date

by microflash • 3 years ago

798 358 3 years ago

ctxc• 3 years ago

We'll I'd much rather see "posted last week" where precision isn't needed over having to look up the date in the calendar.

Where precision is needed (maybe finegrained transactions?) date and time might be better.

jstanley3• 3 years ago

The problem is that on Monday morning "posted last week" could mean it was posted less than 12 hours ago, or almost an entire week ago.

DixieDev• 3 years ago

Where have you seen a service describing something posted less than 12 hours ago as being "posted last week" rather than "posted yesterday"/"posted today"?

kube-system3• 3 years ago

Most of the date libraries that do relative time formatting like this would use hours if it were hours ago.

variants• 3 years ago

Why would you need to look up lasts week date on a calendar

makeitdouble4• 3 years ago

At the "last week" level, assuming we don't keep track of today's date, wouldn't it be good enough to see in the date if it's in the same month or not, and eventually see if it'rougly at the beginning, muddle or end of it ?

If you were told something was uploaded on 2023-10-02, with just the average feeling that we're currently around the middle of the month we'd know the video is roughly a week or two in the past.

yosito2• 3 years ago

If it's December 25th and something says "December 20th", so you really have to look at a calendar to know when it was, relative to today?

mvdtnz11• 3 years ago

How do you know where precision is needed?

dolni• 3 years ago

If precision isn't needed, why do you need to know it was last week? Why can't the precise date be displayed for those who need it?

mathijs• 3 years ago

Exactly. A video on YouTube posted '1 month ago' is not the latest episode I'm looking for. Much quicker to interpret than a timestamp. Sometimes a fuzzy date is enough.

Especially being from Europe: it is never clear if 10/04/23 means October 4th or April 11th unless you know which date format is being used.

crgi• 3 years ago

Agree. I also like the relative dates. E.g. on Github where it’s useful to get an intuition very fast of when files in folders/projects were last updated. I don‘t care about the actual dates in this moment, the fuzziness of the relative date is the approximation I‘m looking for.

funcDropShadow9• 3 years ago

So instead of preferring actually locale-aware date formatting you would prefer fuzziness?

jstanley3• 3 years ago

I don't like these unnecessarily-fuzzy dates either, but:

No human uses “less that 24 hours” as the definition of “yesterday”. Computers, unfortunately, do.

Is that right? I've never noticed anything using that definition of "yesterday". Plus, if anything within the last 24 hours were "yesterday", what would be "today"?

olddustytrail2• 3 years ago

I think they meant "more than 24 hours" rather than "less". It makes more sense in context.

tomjakubowski3• 3 years ago

It's still not right though. People will say at 9pm "I did it yesterday" about something they'd done the previous date at 6pm

delusional• 3 years ago

I personally use "yesterday" for anything before when I last slept. Yesterday can easily be technically today, but just in the late night before I went to bed.

SpaceNoodled2• 3 years ago

Anything in the next 24 hours, obviously.

croes• 3 years ago

I think it doesn't mean everything within the last 24 hours is yesterday but everything before the past 24 hours isn't yesterday anymore.

But usually that's not the decision of the computer but the programmer.

kube-system3• 3 years ago

I don't think it is right. Moment.js for instance, does not work this way. It uses the calendar day definition of "yesterday". Times between the immediately preceding midnight and the midnight before is considered yesterday.

hrnnnnnn2• 3 years ago

Swedish has two words for day. "Dag", same as the english "day", and "dygn", meaning "24 hour period". I'm not sure if you can use it in the way the author suggests that no human does, but maybe?

Too3• 3 years ago

But it’s hardly ever used to represent time offsets in conversational language, especially not backwards in time, only occasionally forwards.

It’s mostly to describe intervals. Usually in billing. You pay x/dygn for this, not x/day, even there it’s getting more rare vs x/24h.

tapvt• 3 years ago

This is my biggest complaint when i reflexively type `git log` to get some context on a branch.

microflash2• 3 years ago

There's a `--date` flag which you can use to control this behavior. Also, it depends on your git configuration.

djaro• 3 years ago

Especially because it becomes so imprecise. On YouTube, "1 year ago" can mean anywhere from 365 to 729 days. Anything between 1 and 2 years ago becomes "1 year ago".

So if I see two videos that were both uploaded "a year ago", it's impossible to know which is more recent without actually opening the videos, going to the description, and looking at the date.

wlesieutre• 3 years ago

It’ll even round down when it’s the same day.

A video uploaded two years ago on 10/14/2021 would still tell you it was one year old if it were uploaded later in the day.

Zambyte• 3 years ago

I found myself using an official YouTube client by accident recently, and it was so jarring to not be able to easily see when the video I was watching was uploaded.

nfriedly• 3 years ago

It looks like there isn't a revanced patch for that yet, but I bet there will be soon.

bbx• 3 years ago

Oh, I was going to mention that one. We're in October 2023. A video published in November 2021 should not say "1 year ago" but rather "Almost 2 years ago".

dmd2• 3 years ago

Even better would be for it to say "November 2021".

Horffupolde• 3 years ago

Use the URL

bilekas3• 3 years ago

I was just thinking about that the other day..

Y_Y2• 3 years ago

File last modified: the other day

I think I'd be ok with this. I love the KDE fuzzy clock that says it's "about lunchtime", much more human than the examples people are decrying here.

marktani• 3 years ago

I was just thinking about that on 2023-10-10

FTFY

BD103• 3 years ago

Not to mention, it is a lot easier to program a function formatting the text to exact dates than writing a function that estimates how long ago it was.

o11c2• 3 years ago

The imprecision could be fixed by forbidding the first digit from being 1, switching to a lower unit instead. So up to 120 seconds ago, then up to 120 minutes ago, then up to 48 hours ago, then up to ~61 days ago (ick, months are evil), then up to 24 months ago.

When such relative dates are in a list it's generally tolerable. The failure to update is far more irritating, and limiting to "yesterday" does not fix that.

jjav2• 3 years ago

I feel like there was a UI designer convention and they had a contest on the best way to hate on users with GUI microagressions and this "N days ago" trend won so now it's everywhere.

I don't want to do date math in my head! Just give me the precise timestamp!

Don't throw away information with nonsense like "1 year ago" when as the parent post says, that could mean anything in a huge range of days.

Just show the actual timestamp!

aristus• 3 years ago

IIRC this started in the Mac finder with OSX 10.2. It bled onto the web a few years later with the advent of UI frameworks and blog feeds.

krater233• 3 years ago

I feel like they regulary do this contests and are only working in making UI more shitty every day.

HeavyStorm• 3 years ago

Hah, like UI designers hold conventions...

The current generation of UI / UX people come usually from non tech backgrounds and are people very keen on... Making things pretty. They seem to know very little, however, about usability and other principles that we, developers, used to care about.

handsclean• 3 years ago

Even more fun: everybody rounds differently. “1 year ago” may mean 365 to 729 days ago to YouTube, but another website thinks it means 183 to 548 days ago (nearest whole number of years), and another website 350 to 548 days ago (nearest whole number of months up to 11, then years), and another anywhere from 1-365 to 364-729 days ago (within the last calendar year).

Zancarius• 3 years ago

Exactly, and I think we as humans also read it differently. To me "3 years ago" reads "sometime in 2020, who knows?" but it might be "October 2020" to someone else. It's so imprecise as to be rather useless.

siva7• 3 years ago

I sometimes really wonder who the heck greenlights such horrible UX at Google.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 3 years ago

"So if I see two videos that were both uploaded "a year ago", it's impossible to know which is more recent without actually opening the videos, going to the description, and looking at the date."

For better or worse (worse, IMHO), this is how YouTube search works. It takes at least two HTTP requests to get the precise dates. One to retreieve the SERP. Another to retrieve the JSON for each videoID. The JSON contains the upload date, etc.

IMO this sort of inefficient design pattern is faciltated by web developers who rely on Javascript, which is seemingly all of them. Webpages become shells for advertising and Javascript is used to fetch non-advertising, i.e., data. Google wants users to make clicks and track them, i.e., collect behavioural data. Thus it makes sense that a user would be forced to "open" a video to see its actual upload date.

The suite of tiny custom utilties I wrote in C can search YT and retrieve all YT videos, this can be upwards of 900 results. The output is CSV, SQL or simple HTML, including upload date and other data I find useful. This is done using only two TCP connections. No browser is needed. The simple HTML is just a page that looks like CSV, with a hyperlink to the video file. It's "YT redesigned" to look like I want it to look. I do the web development before opening the page in a browser.

The custom "downloader" I wrote is smaller, simpler and faster than yt-dlp. No Python required. But most times I don't download. I just use the simple HTML that looks like CSV. IMHO, this is much better than Google's privacy-invasive page laden with Javascript. I can see the precise dates and other useful data. I can sort by vaious columns. And I can exclude garbage videos that Google ("the algorithm") inserts into results, videos that have nothing to do with the search query string I submitted.

funcDropShadow9• 3 years ago

Google wants users to make clicks and track them, i.e., collect behavioural data. Thus it makes sense that a user would be forced to "open" a video to see its actual upload date.

You don't need malice to explain that --- just A/B testing. Making information, that a user wants or needs, less accessible increases engagement, since the user is clearly clicking more.

echelon• 3 years ago

I disagree. Delta time requires less computational load on the brain.

You rarely need to process the precise dates. If the article or item is old, "years" is the perfect measure. You very rarely need to consider the precise day the thing was created on.

Most tools should simply show the date as a tooltip. I was just sharing this video [1] on another thread, and YouTube does it perfectly. Date shows up on hover.

If you're presenting records in a tabular format, then dates win. But consumer products are enhanced by relative time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqZLkzdNYuI

mvdtnz11• 3 years ago

How do I hover on mobile?

rerdavies4• 3 years ago

Long press.

owenpalmer• 3 years ago

Delta time requires less computational load on the brain.

I highly disagree. A quick glance at an absolute date immediately gives me the general idea of when it happened. Most of the time I want to know the exact date to compare it to other dates. When I see a relative date, I almost always need to subtract it.

microflash2• 3 years ago

Maybe. Usually, relatively recent deltas are great which is mentioned in the article. They are less ambiguous enough to be helpful. But longer the deltas are from NOW, the higher is the cognitive overhead in my experience. And interfaces should reduce the overhead to make life easier for people.

makeitdouble4• 3 years ago

The main issue to me is the asymmetry on how much it really matters when date need to be precise, vs how how little it matters the rest of the time.

Putting the spotlight on the format optimized for the people who care the less feels odd. There's not much load on the brain if we just skip the info we don't care about.

Dylan16807• 3 years ago

YouTube does it perfectly. Date shows up on hover.

You have to go to the video itself to get that tooltip, and the relative date is unreasonably vague a lot of the time. It's far from perfect.

saltcured• 3 years ago

I'm surprised nobody in the comments (that I can find) has mentioned another problem of relative times: am I the only one who considers of the ambiguity of _when_ was the page rendered and therefore what is the reference point for the relative time?

Also, to be honest, I hate seeing times without timezone info. As someone often scheduling with people far away, it does not help me to have the calendaring tools silently convert times into my local timezone and display them unqualified. Particularly when everything tends towards a flat rendering style where it isn't always clear what is metadata from the system and what might be text written by the human far away.

Generally, I dislike when designs fixate on "simple" and blithely ignore real failure modes. I have to try to get into some weird headspace to imagine how the UX designers failed at their job so I can try to predict the right failure mode and recover what I can out of the tools...

Times are not universal. Displays are not always rendered at the moment the user observes them. Location of the observer is not always well known. Things fail. Doubly so with mobile.

calfuris• 3 years ago

I would actually point to YouTube as a bad example. YouTube refuses to make the absolute timestamp available unless you actually navigate to a particular video's page. That makes it impossible to see which video uploaded "X period ago" is more recent from e.g. a search result page. Even if you don't _usually_ want an absolute timestamp, there's no reason to make it completely inaccessible in most places.

jacknews2• 3 years ago

Just have both:

  - An hour ago (15:47)
  - Last week (MON 12 SEP 9:20)
  - Two years ago (WED 14 APR 2021 11:47)

Date format to taste, of course.

mvdtnz11• 3 years ago

Why? What's wrong with just the date?

SpaceNoodled2• 3 years ago

Sometimes I turn my math brain off

kube-system3• 3 years ago

Sometimes relative time is more user friendly or more accurately answers a question.

tome2• 3 years ago

It significantly reduces mental exertion to have the calculation performed for you!

pridkett• 3 years ago

In my mind 2020 was still last year. Having both relative and absolute is a nice reminder.

xigoi• 3 years ago

I don't usually remember what date it is.

doomroot• 3 years ago

Because oftentimes you think in chunks of time not dates. If a meeting is in 3 hours in instantly know what kinds of things I can do before that meeting. If a meeting is at 4:45pm. I have to know the current time, calculate the difference then I can start planning my time.

jameshart3• 3 years ago

An actual usecase:

When I’m looking at when a merge request was merged in to master in gitlab, often the level of granularity I am interested in is ‘roughly how long ago’, or ‘what day in the last week was that?’ - the thing I am trying to figure out is just ‘did that go live last Tuesday or last Wednesday?’

I can recover that information from a date with a little mental arithmetic or a cross lookup to a calendar but it would be nice if the computer told me that.

On the other hand, sometimes when I am looking for when a git merge request was merged in I am looking for ‘was it a few minutes before or a few minutes after this error started happening in production?’ And the precise timestamp is of intense interest. At that point seeing a bunch of merge requests tagged as ‘last Tuesday’ is incredibly unhelpful to me. But so would just an unadorned date be.

In general I would lean towards providing the information in a raw form but also contextualized.

But ‘just a date’ is often the worst of both worlds. Even worse if I don’t know which time zone the date is being reported relative to (people often display UTC dates without clarifying that, or even considering that dates need time zone adjusting too).

My dream contextualized timestamp would be something like

   2023/10/09 13:47:20 (Monday, 5 days ago)

dijksterhuis2• 3 years ago

In frontends I’ve found it useful to have

- relative rendered on page

- actual time stamp / date format in a tooltip over relative

If people want more detail they can hover mouse over the relative date.

lhamil64• 3 years ago

What about on mobile?

michaelcampbell• 3 years ago

I agree and enjoy this, but I'm old and use mostly a computer where I have a mouse to hover with. I don't even know HOW to do that on mobile.

haliskerbas• 3 years ago

Another thing about the tooltip is that it makes it harder to copy and paste. At my work I need to copy exact timestamps for postmortems and other investigations, especially to correlate with metrics. For some web pages I have to go to the page source to finally get the fully qualified timestamp.

myk90013• 3 years ago

Alternatively, the actual date can be rendered on the page and if people want the relative they can hower over.

Rendering relative dates instead of actual is not a good user experience in my opinion.

Personally, if I'm looking at a date at all that's because I want to compare it to another date.

Why it's important for work-related stuff doesn't need explaining, I guess. But this is relevant even for personal matters -- e.g., was this photo taken before a friend's wedding or after, etc.

Given how imprecise relative dates are they are not of much help for that.

And in the case I'm not looking to compare dates, seeing relative dates doesn't really add any value for me either.

Also, it's quite obvious something happened 1, 2, 3 years ago from seeing the actual date.

watwut2• 3 years ago

I want actual time stamp / date format rendered on page. The relative is completely useless and I do not want to have to hover over everything to see the dates.

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

Ugh, I pretty strongly disagree. This has become a common pattern in UIs, so I'm used to it now and I expect it, but I still hate it. At least for me, I agree with the article, I always prefer an exact date over "3 weeks ago". So why make me hover over a tooltip?

Also, I find myself needing to copy and paste information like this every now and then, which a tooltip is horrible for.

jacknews2• 3 years ago

Not sure at all about tooltips/hover.

This is what I did for a job code challenge - relative casual time in the main description, and then complete time details under the item: https://imgur.com/qG0US5o

OTOH I'm still looking for a job, so YMMV ;)

mvdtnz11• 3 years ago

Just use the date. Enough of this nonsense.

ccooffee2• 3 years ago

I used to put exact time/date information into tooltips, thinking "the users that need it can find it without overloading the UI". I ended up undoing a lot of that a few years later when user interviews demonstrated that hyperlink-style underlines was insufficient for users to think "mouse over this".

With the prevalence of emoji and higher resolution displays, I wonder if tooltip hinting with an obnoxious question-mark or magnifying-glass image would be sufficient to hint to older/less-savvy users.

coding1233• 3 years ago

You need to tooltip it without underlines... Maybe you did but couldn't tell from your comment.

yosito2• 3 years ago

Approximately two thirds of my time on the internet is spent without a mouse, so probably not.

mvdtnz11• 3 years ago

Or... just render the date.

mjl-2• 3 years ago

i'm "underdotting" anything that has a tooltip (simple css style). most buttons have a tooltip with a sentence explaining what it does/how it works. but this is in webapps that people use relatively intensively, so they can get used to this. it's better than desktop apps that often have no indication that hovering will show a tooltip.

solumunus2• 3 years ago

I imagine the vague “a year ago”, etc is usually the product of some back end scaling strategy?

klysm• 3 years ago

I fail to see how that enables any kind of meaningful scaling.

solumunus2• 3 years ago

I’m definitely not an expert, but my thinking was that perhaps a “sort by new” would be much faster if there were only a handful of potential values which could be indexed, rather than every single datetime value being unique.

Kwpolska• 3 years ago

That doesn't sound like it. This is a frontend thing. The only sort of strategy I can think of is caching the page for a year, but you can cache it forever if you use an absolute date.

mcphage• 3 years ago

I’d be happy if articles included at least the year. So many times I’ll come across something, and have no idea how recent it was because there’s no date whatsoever.

phendrenad2• 3 years ago

This depends on how important the precision is. "1 week ago" can be fine (for blog posts), or it can be stupid (for news articles).

makeitdouble4• 3 years ago

One aspect that is so disturbing with the fuzzy display is when the day of the week is the most relevant info.

Looking at gitlab's history for instance, it's way more helpful to know if it was merged on friday than "last week" or "2 days ago".

Same for chat history etc. happening at the limit of a month, knowing exactly if the discussion happened before or after the beginning of the month can matter a lot.

For everything else I personally could care less if it was 4 weeks ago or 2 months ago, so getting the exact date also doesn't deprive me of info.

I actually have a hard time imagining a scenario where a fuzzy date is more helpful than the exact one.

pavel_lishin2• 3 years ago

I wrote a Greasemonkey script to replace Jira's useless time labels with the full date, including the day of the week. Highly recommend doing this for any browser-based software you use regularly.

crtasm• 3 years ago

I don't use Jira but suggest sharing it on GreasyFork for those that do.

There's loads of scripts on there for Jira but I didn't see any for the dates: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts?q=jira

jbaber• 3 years ago

I think I'm at 8 different greasemonkey scripts to manhandle Jira.

john_cogs3• 3 years ago

GitLab team member here.

You can use absolute times (ex: October 14, 2023 11:51AM) instead of relative times in GitLab by changing your preferences: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/profile/preferences.html#sho...

simon04• 3 years ago

I'm waiting for the day when I can additionally configure "use ISO8601/RfC3339 timestamps"

Not only on GitLab, but everywhere. In any application. On any website. It's a pain in the ass on Linux.

gsich5• 3 years ago

For some insane (=AM/PM) reason the language is tied to time preference.

thebigspacefuck• 3 years ago

Thank you for supporting this. Anyone know if GitHub has a similar option?

troupo5• 3 years ago

Why isn't this the default?

Instead of providing a useful meaningful date, you:

- obscure information

- spent additional devtime creating a time conversion

- spent additional time implementing an otherwise useless setting for this

Why?!

zoky• 3 years ago

I actually have a hard time imagining a scenario where a fuzzy date is more helpful than the exact one.

It can be, in niche scenarios. I have an application that pulls information in from another database, reformats it, and displays it for the user. The update is expensive and time-consuming, so it has to be triggered manually by the user when it is needed. In this case, the exact time of the last update isn’t particularly useful; the only thing that matters is how old the data is, which is to say how likely it is to be out of sync with the source of truth. In some cases, information needs to be as up-to-the-minute as possible, so if the info is just a few hours old it needs to be refreshed. Other times, information that is 4 or 5 days out of date or longer is totally fine, so there is no need to trigger an update that could take as long as 10 minutes.

For this particular purpose, fuzzing the date is actually more useful that providing the time of the last update, since order-of-magnitude precision is good enough, and it saves the user from having to compare the update time to the current time and do a calculation. Admittedly though, this is a rare case, and the vast majority of the time a relative fuzzy date is less helpful.

djha-skin2• 3 years ago

Date calculations are really easy for most people. Even in this case I just think I would be annoyed.

Izkata3• 3 years ago

I actually have a hard time imagining a scenario where a fuzzy date is more helpful than the exact one.

I use it for communicating short-term times in the future when the recipients are across multiple time zones: "___ will finish running around 4-5 hours after this comment", "___ is fixed and will start its next run about 15 hours after this comment", etc

makeitdouble4• 3 years ago

Thanks, this is one I am 200% behind. Youtube does this well too, knowing that a feed will start in 5h or 2 days is more helpful than the exact date I'd have to calculate from today.

I think that's the proximity and actionability that makes the difference.

sidlls• 3 years ago

This isn't just a "problem" with computers and fuzzy "<time ago>" labels. Humans do this, too. The worst is when people use inappropriately long periods, for example when a reporter says something like "Joe Criminal was convicted last month of XYZ", when "last month" means some time in the previous few days that happened to fall in the previous month (this kind of thing happens a lot). It takes more effort to come up with that bullshit than to simply be more precise.

oftenwrong• 3 years ago

On a related note, I dislike when time zones are omitted from displayed datetimes. I have to guess: Is it my client's tz, the server's tz, UTC, or something else?

unlikelytomato• 3 years ago

My favorite is when I see a photo posted to Google maps "1653 days 5 hours ago"

coding1233• 3 years ago

At minimum it should say Friday Morning. Glad someone is fighting back on this practice.

CrzyLngPwd• 3 years ago

I like the imprecise date, especially when they have the eact datetime, down to the second, in a ABBR title, which is clickable on mobile.

I work from home, for myself, and I don't care what date it is and I rarely both with the date, and knowing something was about a week or a month ago is about as accurate as I need.

xjay• 3 years ago

If they used absolute <time> the browser could format it to our preference (which varies).

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...

midasuni• 3 years ago

What does that actually look like for the average viewer. In the examples the output in iOS/safari is as if the tag doesn’t exist.

Izkata3• 3 years ago

Likewise on Firefox, doesn't seem to do anything despite the compatibility table saying it does.

marcosdumay• 3 years ago

Looks to me that it's a semantic-only tag that doesn't change the text on the screen at all. The GP is just incorrectly assuming it's something different.

I have no idea what a browser supporting it even means. Browsers aren't supposed to do anything with it.

Analemma_• 3 years ago

The dream of a web where the server simply sent data, and the client chose how to display it, is totally dead. Web designers want their websites to look a certain way right down to the pixel, and client-side display control messes that up. To be clear, it's not that you can't still do it, but the website is never going to be designed for it and actively help you.

dreamcompiler2• 3 years ago

This is just one symptom of the advertising-supported web. The web was intended to inform, but modern websites are designed to impress. Personally, I'm more impressed with websites designed to inform, but the average person apparently isn't.

The Semantic Web failed for the same reason: Humans click on ads but computers don't. Hence we're left with a web that is not only designed purely for human consumption, but also to appeal to the ADD part of our simian brains that says "Oooooh. Shiny!".

BrandoElFollito• 3 years ago

The dream of a web where the server simply sent data, and the client chose how to display it, is totally dead

When did you have such a web?

The web used to be completely server side, so you could only receive formatted HTML/CSS/JS and you would need to scrape this page to get information.

Today you have (or can have) APIs and some sites are cleanly server/client. It is much, much, much better than it was if you want to consume data. At least there is a framework for that (not always available), as opposed to before when there was none.

afavour• 3 years ago

Web designers want their websites to look a certain way right down to the pixel

I’d say we’re actually further away from that than we’ve ever been. I’m old enough to remember <table> based designs, “best viewed at 800x600” etc etc. These days we have responsive design, adaptive color palettes for dark mode and accessibility, flags for users the prefer more contrast, reduced motion, etc etc etc.

User preference time display is interesting but I don’t think it’s realistic. My preferences can be universally applied without context.

titzer• 3 years ago

It's really been downhill since the BBS.

fatih-erikli• 3 years ago

Agree, when they are archived like in (google or web.archive.org), they will be relative to the indexing date if the label isn't calculated in client side, probably the javascript won't be working well in archive though.

Plus, consider using time tag, datetime attribute for displaying dates in a more accessible way. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti... It's not so much different than a span tag in browsers yet, but why not making out webpages future compatible.

exabrial• 3 years ago

A lot of these "UI Features" are just annoying. the worst one is cutting off the ends of Tex...

pmontra• 3 years ago

The worst application I use about misrepresenting timestamps is gitg.

Check this screenshot

https://ubunlog.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/git-gui-gitg....

There are a number of commits marked as 3 days ago. It's only a little bit better than no information at all: or doesn't tell me if they happened in the morning or in the afternoon, or all within an hour or spread on all the day. That's important when I didn't logged how many hours I worked for a customer and I have to assess it one week later. I have to click every single commit and check the timestamp on the other side of the screen.

mpweiher• 3 years ago

... screenshot ...

And screenshots are, IMHO, one important reason it should always be the full date.

ranting-moth2• 3 years ago

Wow, what the screenshot is showing is a candidate for a professional misconduct if we had a governing body.

jquast2• 3 years ago

Also that git timestamps are localized to each individual developer and are not validated, it can make global development more difficult. https://alesnosek.com/blog/2017/01/02/git-getting-the-timing...

MaxBarraclough• 3 years ago

I'm surprised that there seems to be no way to configure gitg to always show full datetimes.

drpixie• 3 years ago

Outlook webmail is pretty bad. Not only does it do the "... days ago" thing, but it wants to show what it regards are important at the top. So you get two partly duplicated lists, partially shuffled together - it's horrible x 2.

brainzap• 3 years ago

yes please!

NikkiA• 3 years ago

I'll go further and say anything longer ago than an hour should show the date + time, with timezone.

fuster• 3 years ago

Thank you for this. I actually thought it was only me that found these kinds of "timestamps" much less useful more often than not.

davidthewatson• 3 years ago

Agree with the sentiment, but I'm sad that meaningful words like fortnight that once colored language are mostly archaic.

Mike Meyers deserves credit for trying to keep such language alive 30 years ago:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108174/characters/nm0001439

kccqzy• 3 years ago

"Fourscore and seven years ago"

Phrases like this warm my heart too. While I abhor relative dates in general, seeing this in a UI can be a nice Easter egg.

Aspos• 3 years ago

"1 year ago" may not be precise enough, but "11 months ago" often is. When implementing such a function we tend to avoid "1". Instead of "1 week ago" it is "6 days ago"

jrmg• 3 years ago

Also: include the year. I’ve been bitten so many times by web forums not showing the date on comments (“5 Jul”), only to find the comment was written years ago that I no longer even trust dates without years. I find myself hunting around to try to get a year to be shown to me if it’s not there upfront.

bxparks• 3 years ago

Also: use 4-digit years. There is a forum that I visit a few times a week. It's been around for 20-30 years. It prints dates as 08/11/02, 09/03/04. Very confusing

jiveturkey2• 3 years ago

not sure what the confusing part is here? 02 = 2002.

dboreham• 3 years ago

Whatever fancy misguided millennial time encoding your planning to use, display the actual time stamp as well (yes with TZ) for the rest of us. Plenty of screen space these days.

ergonaught• 3 years ago

Everything should just say the actual date/time. The “longer ago than yesterday” bit is the slippery slope. It’s never acceptable. If it’s not configurable, it’s always the wrong idea.

rerdavies4• 3 years ago

I think we can all agree that youtube does it horribly wrong. But it seems silly to complain about a practice that increases utility by citing examples of software that has done it wrong.

And anything less than a week ago (but more than 24 hours ago) should just say the day of the week.

ranting-moth2• 3 years ago

I personally would find that quite upsetting.

rerdavies4• 3 years ago

I'd propose user-survey to the death at dawn at twenty paces.

funcDropShadow9• 3 years ago

And anything less than a week ago (but more than 24 hours ago) should just say the day of the week.

Why is it so hard to understand that the importance of the precision does not depend on the date or the event, the date is attached to, but on the activity of the reader. Therefore no rule a programmer can implement will be good in all cases. That leaves the developer with two choices: Let the user choose or display a complete date and time.

jameshart3• 3 years ago

No human uses “less that 24 hours” as the definition of “yesterday”. Computers, unfortunately, do

Correction: computers programmed by programmers who believe falsehoods about time zones and dates do.

It’s entirely possible to unambiguously slide a timestamp into the local calendar of your user and from that determine what the local date offset is. If you just take floor(now - time / 86400) then of course you’re going to produce garbage.

dreamcompiler2• 3 years ago

This is an issue in the spatial domain too. Whenever somebody invites me to their house I ask them "what's the address?" and they inevitably proceed to give me a long verbal list of relative directions: "Go east on highway 10 and take the first exit, then turn left, go two blocks, and then turn right." There are a thousand ways this can go wrong. Errors compound.

Please just give me your actual street address, and Google and I will figure out how to get there.*

*Except yes, Google gets many addresses wrong. Those are the exception.

survirtual• 3 years ago

Almost every address where someone says "google gets it wrong" is simply not accurate. Mapping software was right every time.

The maps are constantly updated, whether google, apple, or openstreet. The perception of them being inaccurate unfortunately does not tend to update.

poorlyknit2• 3 years ago

Google Maps used to be really bad in my then neighborhood which had roads and garages underground and bike lanes and footpaths on the ground level.

For the longest time they didn't even have the numbers of individual houses and treated the whole area as an atomic blob :shrug: A neighbor put the numbers into OpenStreetMap eventually and soon after Google Maps had then too.

For a while they still treated it as a normal road though which means "find route" was still unusable but you could at least use it as a map. Nowadays they have separate entries for the above-ground paths and it works.

EDIT: Please someone write "Falsehoods programmers believe about city planning"

jquast2• 3 years ago

Why is nobody mentioning using a tenths decimal, like 1.1 days ago, 1.9 years ago, 2.5 weeks ago. That’s how I like to implement it!

poorlyknit2• 3 years ago

Instead of a decimal place I like to use the next smaller unit, i.e.

    1 day 2 hours ago
    1 year 10 months ago
    2 weeks 3 days ago

As a user "1.9 years" would have me scratching my head a bit.

amitizle• 3 years ago

I thought about that also a week ago

dabedee• 3 years ago

Github does that and it always makes it very difficult to understand when something was actually done/committed.

MisterKent• 3 years ago

Seriously, of all the platforms that do this pattern, this one is the most user hostile.

codazoda2• 3 years ago

Yup, agreed. I came hear looking for this one. Whenever I need a timestamp in GitHub I need the exact time. I always have to hover to get the info I need.

austinl• 3 years ago

Github was the first thing I thought of when reading this. My only use case for the commit date is to quickly check if a certain commit merged before a branch was automatically cut, so I need the day of the week and time, not "11 days ago."

Fortunately, if you hover over the relative date, it will expand to show the exact date time, but it would be nice if this were swapped.

anigbrowl• 3 years ago

Yes, I'm sick of these cutesy approximations on social media as well, it screates more confusion than clarity.

not_your_vase• 3 years ago

I would go even further: I would remove these rounded, relative timestamps altogether.

iOS mail app really irritates me with this: whenever I open it, it tells me "Updated just now". Then I pull to refresh, and suddenly there are unread emails I received 2 hours ago. Just tell me the damn time when you did the update.

Moru7• 3 years ago

One benefit with Thunderbird. It's still saying the exact date and time (knock on wood). If it's today, it only says time, anything else you get full date and time.

xp845• 3 years ago

Even worse is the stupid timestamps on notifications. If you don’t catch it within an hour it becomes imprecise (1h vs 2h ago). Maybe I really need to know exactly when that notification came in! And there is zero way to tell. Just give me the time! I can tell time.

wouldbecouldbe• 3 years ago

I mean if we are going to nitpick. Last Tuesday etc would be even better. Then past a week give the dates. If possible with day name instead of nr

hbcondo714• 3 years ago

I recently came across this conumdrum myself when developing a live streaming web app[1]. The app formats a DateTime using a fuzzy relative duration[2] which displays "1 minute ago", "2 days ago", "yesterday", etc...

I also concur with the author of the post saying "ago" is not enough. So the app has been updated to display:

  fuzzy relative duration
  hour:minute:second period timezone
  full_day_name abbreviated_month_name day_number

I had to write a bit of logic[3] since new items only arrive on weekdays so when viewed on the weekend, new items do not say "23 hours ago" and instead say "yesterday".

[1] https://live.last10k.com

[2] https://hexdocs.pm/timex/Timex.html#from_now/3

[3] https://github.com/hbcondo/last10k_liveview/blob/main/lib/la...

Xenoamorphous• 3 years ago

I absolutely hate that recent versions of Outlook (at least in a Mac) shows “yesterday” in the date field in emails. I get hundreds of dates per day, show me the bloody time too! And this is not configurable!

“Yesterday” is barely any shorter than the date in “yyyy/mm/dd hh:mi:ss”.

xp845• 3 years ago

Yup. Configurable went out the window about the same time using any native UI widgets or windows did. One 24-year-old “UX designer” will decide the single best way for everyone in every situation, and their decisions are final.

taeric• 3 years ago

Meh. You should be able to get to the date, but relative times are super useful. Especially as inputs. And realize relative dates are calendar specific. Last week could be just 12 hours ago.

If I want a picture we took, odds are high I will have a fuzzy recollection of when. At this point, "last decade," is probably pretty useful.

codazoda2• 3 years ago

GitHub is my worst offender. When I need a timestamp for Git I always need the exact date and time, even if it's recent.

This was mentioned elsewhere but it's buried under another comment. I think GitHub needs top level placement for this audience. I imagine a lot of us feel this pain from time to time.

snarfy• 3 years ago

I'll leave my chat program open for two weeks and it says the message was received 'yesterday', even though it was actually two weeks ago but hasn't updated because it's just been sitting there idle. Anything other than the actual timestamp is utterly useless.

layer86• 3 years ago

That particular point is an implementation issue, however. There are web forums I frequent where the time indications update in realtime while the page is just sitting there.

funcDropShadow9• 3 years ago

Does this also work in a screenshot?

deckar01• 3 years ago

You don’t need time deltas for display. Just omit the prefix (left of the minute) that is equal to now.

layer86• 3 years ago

The compromise is to have the actual timestamp as a tooltip, and/or have a click/tap toggle the representation. But yes, it’s often annoying to only have a vague “3 months ago”.

antifa• 3 years ago

JIRA/bitbucket: something that really pissed me off. It was early January. I was in a rush and needed to know if some commits deployed a few days ago, 1 week ago, or 2-4 weeks ago, or never. Nothing overly specific. I get to the specific page for it. All of the deployment dates say something completely useless like "last year" or "a year ago".

dang• 3 years ago

Url changed from https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/10/13/relative-time-labels/, which points to this.

novok• 3 years ago

I like how apple photos does it. It's today, yesterday, then day of the week name (tuesday) and then the date after you pass the 7 day threshold. And they always put in the time

Animats• 3 years ago

Worse date things:

* Displaying "October 13" for dates that are years old.

* The convention that published papers don't have dates on them. This is a convention from the days when papers came in bound journals with a date on the cover, so there was no need for a date on each article. Now they come as standalone PDF files with no date info.

astura• 3 years ago

Gitlab gets me with this every Monday morning. I see someone did something "two days ago" I think "they worked the weekend?" I hover over the date and realized Gitlab thinks Friday afternoon was two days ago.

imp0cat• 3 years ago

You can actually (finally!) turn this of in your preferences and see exact dates.

rokhayakebe• 3 years ago

How about showing both?

butz• 3 years ago

It's funny when OpenStreetMap "User blocks" page display status that "Ends in over 90 years".

fifticon• 3 years ago

How can I upvote this enough.. Luckily, often the timestamp is visible as a tooltip. Case in point: When you browse npm versions of packages, it will date them with "version 5.3.27 was released 'about a year ago' craziness. ARE YOU PEOPLE OUT OF YOUR BLOODY MIND? i am browsing through older packages to figure out the order they were released in, to sketch a pinning of compatible packages to form a build configuration, and 20 sequential packages are reported as 'about a year ago', requiring me to tooltip each one to figure out which ones are too recent to use.. The crayon eating has gotten out of hand. Brought to you by the same morons who build ORMs that map table names between (irregular) singular and plural. To serve what need..

antonvs• 3 years ago

ARE YOU PEOPLE OUT OF YOUR BLOODY MIND?

No, they’re just stupid, or at best, ignorant to a degree that makes them incompetent.

roelschroeven• 3 years ago

Luckily, often the timestamp is visible as a tooltip.

What? Really? Checking ... yep, indeed, Youtube does have such a tooltip. How come I didn't know that? Thanks, that's very useful.

johnnyanmac6• 3 years ago

yeah, common pattern, even works on HackerNews. It's nice when you need an exact time down to the minute or second.

But Hackernews for stuff older than a year (maybe slihtly younger) does indeed just show the exact date for a post.

glaucon• 3 years ago

The crayon eating has gotten out of hand

Beautifully put.

troupo5• 3 years ago

ARE YOU PEOPLE OUT OF YOUR BLOODY MIND

The people who do this for anything developer-related are criminally incompetent. What amazes me is that not only are they still employed, this idiocy is everywhere. From npm to GitHub to CircleCI to...

xp845• 3 years ago

It’s interesting here in that there’s a sizable group (looks to me like 25% but let’s be generous and assume 50%). Seems like the kind of thing that should 100% be a user preference.

Too bad “having too many options” is perceived as a bad thing by the current regime of aesthetics-first “designers.” It’s the only thing they hate more than using screen real estate for something besides seas of white space.

globular-toast• 3 years ago

For my work I use the following simple design: display the date and when you hover it tells you how many days ago it is etc. I initially had it the other day around, but users complained and said the date was more useful. I hate websites that don't even give the date on hover.

djha-skin2• 3 years ago

I actually really hate fuzzy date displays. More often than not I want to know exactly when something happened and 2 hours ago isn't usually good enough. Just tell me the exact time I'm a smart guy I can figure out how long ago that was.

mikelward• 3 years ago

At 00:00, for an email received one minute ago, it says "yesterday".

If they don't have space for the full date and time, it could be "Fri 23:59".

tlogan2• 3 years ago

Yeah. For emails I use display time stamps extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/display-email-time...

tlogan2• 3 years ago

The worst part is when you share screenshot of something: there are not actually dates so person receiving screenshots has no clue.

rvdginste• 3 years ago

I find these imprecise, rounded, relative timestamps very irritating and I am so happy to see that I am not the only one.

If you have the exact absolute data, then just give me that.. in its original form. Unbelievable that people put effort into making it less precise and making relative. Why? Because it looks _cute_? Personally, I always find it hard and tiring to mentally process these and map it back to an actual point in time.

apaprocki• 3 years ago

Maybe I’m in the minority, but if you’re ever not going to display the actual date, put the exact date/time in a nice, readable tooltip, or otherwise surface a way to see/copy it on right-click. I feel like some of this could be highly customized user agent settings. Always send the most precise data to the renderer and let it render how the user wants to consume it. By default, that could be how you want them to see it, but don’t get in the way.

quitit• 3 years ago

I'm glad I'm not alone in this, Apple's Mail app used to display Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday/etc for the last week of email before switching to numeric dates. It would drive me crazy as I mentally work with dates and having to constantly check "ok what date was last Tuesday", "ok what date was last Saturday", introduced needless complexity.

Someone must have spoken up, because it's now as follows: the time(for today's email), "Yesterday", then the numerical dates.

On a tangent: Maybe one of our german friends can answer if the day before yesterday is displayed as "vorgestern", since that's part of the german lexicon.

Second tangent: While we're at it, can English finally standardise what "next <day>" means. For example I'm writing this on Saturday, and "next Monday" is permitted to mean either in 2 days time or in 9 days time.

amelius• 3 years ago

Fast forward 10^8 years, and the actual date will cause too much visual clutter.

temporallobe• 3 years ago

This kind of thing is especially egregious on the GitLab UI where, for example, something was committed “a moment ago”, “just now”, or some vague shit like that.

thenickdude• 3 years ago

That one makes perfect sense to me, as if it said like "1 second ago", this would almost always be a wrong statement due to differing clocks, and the time taken to render and send you the page.

If the time is static on the page rather than dynamically updating in JS, for such small intervals it'll already be out of date by the time you scroll down to read it. But dynamically updating timestamps is irritating because it causes the content to "animate", and that movement catches the eye for no good reason, since nothing is really changing with the content (Reddit does this).

Due to clock skews you can even have the event come from slightly in the future, and marking that accurately like "2 seconds from now" would be even more confusing.

"just now" solves all these issues

john_cogs3• 3 years ago

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881456

hnthrowaway0315• 3 years ago

Damn right. I don't get why but both Github and GCP don't show precise date. Why???? Who TF made the decision?

rickcarlino• 3 years ago

/u/epistasis said it best: “UI is communication, and UI designers have decided that mumbling is cool.”

teddyh• 3 years ago

Unclear communication increases repetition and confusion, which can be creatively interpreted as engagement, increasing ad revenue.

funcDropShadow9• 3 years ago

It doesn't increase ad revenue. It increases scores in A/B tests which is believed to predict ad revenue. Should be an entry in "Falsehoods project managers believe about A/B tests".

McNutty• 3 years ago

I just spent a while reading several pages of the grumpy.website, lots of good content there and should be mandatory reading for UI designers

Aeolun• 3 years ago

Since everyone here seems to be screaming for absolute dates, let me say the opposite. Whenever I look st a timestamp, 80% of the time I’m interested only in how far back that time was relative to today. Relative timestamps are great for at a glance viewing.

walthamstow• 3 years ago

If I added up all the seconds I've waited hovering over a GitHub date waiting for the proper timestamp...

It seems to me part of this 'friendly' design and copy that is everywhere on the internet these days. You're not my friend, you're a tool, like a screwdriver or a kettle.

Jenda_2• 3 years ago

I have a slightly related problem: infinite scrolling as the only way to access the archive. Like, imagine I want to know what some blog/media site posted during some important historical event, and there is no pagination or calendar to pick. Or am I just using the web wrong and there is some way? Example: https://www.astralcodexten.com/archive

cushpush2• 3 years ago

Always use the name of the day of the week, Tomorrow is vaguetalk for Future and Yesterday, past.

jks• 3 years ago

In the other direction (and on a different scale) I hate it when the bus-schedule app I use tells me that my bus leaves "in 8 minutes". Ok, I'll put on my shoes and jacket, check if I have all the stuff in my bag - darnit, I forgot my book, can I spend a minute searching for it and still catch the bus? I check the time, which is 9:57, and I remember that the bus leaves... 8 minutes after some unspecified moment a few minutes ago.

Fanmade2• 3 years ago

I remember when I had to use Jira for the first time, which had this "n days ago" display for the tickets. I don't remember if that couldn't be changed or the person in charge just could not/would not do it, but I needed the proper dates often. So I wrote a basic user script which would read the actual dates out of the title (at least the date was in there) tags and then replace the unusable default output with it. I put that in button on the bookmarks bar and over time, several people saw it and adopted my solution. I never met anyone who liked the "human readable" format more that the actual date.

lorenzosnap• 3 years ago

The reporting of a message's timestamp really depends on the system you are working on. And the key aspect is to genuinely think how the users think about that timestamp. I recently implemented it in a real time system where I write things like "just now" (within the last 10 seconds) "more than 10 seconds ago" (between 10 seconds and less than a minute) "more than a minute ago" (between 1 one minute and less than 10 minutes) "more than 10 minutes ago" (between 10 minutes and less than 1 hour) ... (I think you get the gist) After it say more than a day... then that's it the message is considered very old

jmeri• 3 years ago

That is so true. Many websites provide no age indication whatsoever... I hate guessing if the information provided was correct yesterday or five years ago.

RecycledEle• 3 years ago

Everything upload din the last 5 minutes should say the exact date.

joshstrange• 3 years ago

Apple Wallet/Card is so annoying with this. It puts dates on transactions over a week old but within the last week it says “Wednesday” (DOW) or “Yesterday”. I don’t use my Apple Card for a lot since it doesn’t automatically integrate with YNAB and it’s always a pain to enter those transactions.

Thankfully YNAB’s date picker is a little calendar so I can figure out the right date easily enough but it’s always jarring to see “Monday” after I’ve been looking at real dates for older transactions.

zephrx1111• 3 years ago

Ca we do both, 1 year ago: 2022-1-1?

higeorge13• 3 years ago

Imagine in 100+ years, people watching youtube videos uploaded _1 century ago_.

HocusLocus• 3 years ago

I'm grumpy too... and I think pages that have chatty dates and do not contain embedded parseable dates/times at all should be shot with a poop gun.

But I realize that humans feel the need to do this and I like the way Reddit does it.

<time title="Sat Sep 9 13:06:15 2023 UTC" datetime="2023-09-09T13:06:15+00:00" class="">1 month ago</time>

with a title to show tooltip for casual interest, but especially important, the chatty time within an explicit TIME tag that allows parseable stamps to be saved with pages and mined regardless of local naming conventions.

PennRobotics• 3 years ago

In Windows Explorer, it's always a mystery if my date specifier is valid. I would often forget a colon or use the wrong flag name or accidentally use a leading dash as most command line flags would accept. When there are then no search results, I mistakenly assume the document I want hasn't been uploaded yet. I email a colleague, they reply it's in the network drive as anyone in the organization would expect, I look like an amateur.

I've resorted to using "datemodified:this year -kind:=folder" on a keyboard macro and changing 'year' to 'month' or 'this' to 'last'... or using WSL to search.

One obvious problem here is that the number of files I search through changes with each season. January and February are the worst, because "last month" and "last year" overlap for one month, and then on February 1st, the query results are again exclusive. If I want all PDFs published in the past three weeks after returning from winter break, I need to use two search queries in Explorer.

Contrast that with Linux, where there are multiple standard, well-documented, reasonably easy to remember methods of searching by date, including within very specific timeframes---not just a choice of month or year. On the GUI side, GNOME Files has much more customizability and isn't any harder to understand than Explorer.

Just as the past decade has been a disappointment in home assistant progress, I had hoped in this present age, ANY reasonably query could be parsed, and optionally, the exact query shown as the machine sees and/or a plain-text standardized description of the search.

    [<Ctrl> + F] "PDFs from the past three weeks"
    
    ↓
    
    Parsed: find "//doc-network/rel/**/*.pdf" /createdafter 2023-09-24
    
    Searching for all Adobe Reader documents (PDF format) created between three weeks ago and today in the current folder ("rel") and/or any subfolder.

As a bonus, the best five results matching MOST (but not all) of the query would be previewed at the bottom of the search results, slightly greyed, with "84 weaker matches found, such as...", and this could also be disabled for privacy/performance/etc reasons

nazri1• 3 years ago

I have given up on all hope of UI/UX getting better on general consumer devices. The downward trend started since smartphone became mainstream.

rerdavies4• 3 years ago

The obvious solution: milliseconds since 1970/1/1T00:00:00Z.

The best compromises make everyone equally unhappy.

Either that or "Wednesday about teatime".

But seriously. Youtube: NOBODY cares whether a video is 2.46 years old. Github: slightly annoying, but 3 days ago is generally more useful if you have to choose only one.

m463• 3 years ago

Does anyone remember text clocks from decades ago.

  "It's a little before half past four."

(so long ago, I can't remember the utility that presented the time like that)

roguas• 3 years ago

I disagree. I don't know what day it is, have to check and I dont want to run this computation even if I knew without checking. Likely this is preference thingy, you prefer precise, I prefer convenient.

Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date

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