23 ms·

Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date

798 points by microflash 3y ago

ctxc 3y 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.
- jstanley 3y 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 3y 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"?
    - idbehold 3y ago
      The point is that both are technically correct. At 12:00am on January 1 that happens to fall on a Monday something that occurred 1 second ago can be considered to have taken place: last week (depending on when you consider weeks to start/end), last month, last year, yesterday, etc.
      - mynameisvlad 3y ago
        Sure, they’re both technically correct, but that wasn’t the question. The question was > 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"? Every single time display library I have seen will do as the poster explained, and show more granular information the closer it is (generally starting at “X seconds ago”). Your technicality is certainly true, but a strawman.
        JdeBP 3y ago
        Actually, it's that question that is the straw man. jstanley's point is that to the reader "posted last week" could mean almost no time at all ago. It's not about the display library choosing to label recent things as this. It's about humans reading such a label and not receiving the intended information, because humans don't cut off what they understand "last week" to mean at some arbitrary 12-hours-ago mark.
        mynameisvlad 3y ago
        Except they do get the intended information. The label doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the user would have seen other examples showing the specificity at intervals other than “last week” which sensitizes them to the cutoff points. This is literally a non-problem. If a library behaved in the way the parent commenter makes them seem like, then, sure, they have a point. But they don’t. Something that occurred a second ago would say “a second ago”. Something that occurred 5 minutes and 43 seconds ago would say “6 minutes ago”, etc. There is no library in the world which takes a timestamp a second ago and outputs “a week ago” and pretending like there is is, literally, a strawman.
        jstanley 3y ago
        > the user would have seen other examples Yeah, I've seen enough examples to know that no 2 websites implement the same logic so I shouldn't try to second-guess anything more than what the text literally says.
        mvdtnz 3y ago
        If the user needs to know the details of your "time display library" to disambiguate "last week" then you've already lost. It's bad UX. Stop doing it.
        mynameisvlad 3y ago
        But… users don’t. Literally no library out there does what the parent commenter claims they could do. They all use sensible cutovers for relative dates.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    Most of the date libraries that do relative time formatting like this would use hours if it were hours ago.
- variants 3y ago
  Why would you need to look up lasts week date on a calendar
- makeitdouble 3y 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.
- yosito 3y 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?
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  How do you know where precision is needed?
- mathijs 3y 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 3y 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.
  - funcDropShadow 3y ago
    So instead of preferring actually locale-aware date formatting you would prefer fuzziness?
- dolni 3y 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?
jstanley 3y 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"?
- olddustytrail 3y ago
  I think they meant "more than 24 hours" rather than "less". It makes more sense in context.
  - tomjakubowski 3y 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
    - thfuran 3y ago
      I think you switched around your sixes and nines.
      - tomjakubowski 3y ago
        I don't think I mixed it up > No human uses “more that 24 hours” as the definition of “yesterday”. Computers, unfortunately, do. At 9pm on Oct 14, 6pm on Oct 13 was > 24 hours ago, and people would still call it "yesterday".
    - olddustytrail 3y ago
      I don't think they're saying it can't be more than 24 hours just that it can be less. Clearly it's confusingly worded so probably best if they just redo it.
      - tomjakubowski 3y ago
        agreed completely - "yesterday" usually includes times both greater than and less than 24 hours ago. People usually just mean… some time in the date previous to now. Roughly.
tapvt 3y ago
This is my biggest complaint when i reflexively type `git log` to get some context on a branch.
- microflash 3y ago
  There's a `--date` flag which you can use to control this behavior. Also, it depends on your git configuration.
djaro 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
    It looks like there isn't a revanced patch for that yet, but I bet there will be soon.
- bbx 3y 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".
  - dmd 3y ago
    Even better would be for it to say "November 2021".
    - typon 3y ago
      Where's the fun in that? Let's design heuristics that work culturally in some parts of the world and be imprecise instead!
echelon 3y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqZLkzdNYuI
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  How do I hover on mobile?
  - rerdavies 3y ago
    Long press.
    - mvdtnz 3y ago
      Are you sure? https://imgur.com/a/dsm4zL9 https://imgur.com/a/dsm4zL9
- owenpalmer 3y 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.
- microflash 3y 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.
- 3y ago
jacknews 3y 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.
- mvdtnz 3y ago
  Why? What's wrong with just the date?
  - SpaceNoodled 3y ago
    Sometimes I turn my math brain off
  - kube-system 3y ago
    Sometimes relative time is more user friendly or more accurately answers a question.
  - tome 3y ago
    It significantly reduces mental exertion to have the calculation performed for you!
    - pintxo 3y ago
      The problem with this is that the dev cannot know which calculation I need!
      - tome 3y ago
        Right, and that's the case with every feature implemented in software. Showing both the precise datetime of creation and a "human readable ago" seems to cover a lot of bases that users seem to like, though. Recall, we're commenting on a thread that's proposing removing a feature that already exists (so presumably people want it).
        myk9001 3y ago
solumunus 3y ago
I imagine the vague “a year ago”, etc is usually the product of some back end scaling strategy?
- klysm 3y ago
  I fail to see how that enables any kind of meaningful scaling.
  - solumunus 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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).
makeitdouble 3y 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_lishin 3y 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 3y 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 https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts?q=jira
    - pavel_lishin 3y ago
      Ooh, I'll see if I can do that this week.
  - jbaber 3y ago
    I think I'm at 8 different greasemonkey scripts to manhandle Jira.
- john_cogs 3y 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#show-exact-times-instead-of-relative-times https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/profile/preferences.html#sho...
sidlls 3y 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 3y 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?
CrzyLngPwd 3y 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 3y 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/time https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...
- midasuni 3y 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.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    Likewise on Firefox, doesn't seem to do anything despite the compatibility table saying it does.
  - marcosdumay 3y 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.
    - kevincox 3y ago
      This is correct. It would be nice to have an option for the browser to format it for you. Especially since you can't reliably get the user's time zone on the server. I wrote some JS that watches the page for these and updates them to be more user friendly and use the user's locale. But it would be nice if this was the browser's problem to solve (and can consider things like non-locale preferences such as always showing the time across websites and how far relative times should stretch)
- Analemma_ 3y 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.
fatih-erikli 3y 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/time 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 3y ago
A lot of these "UI Features" are just annoying. the worst one is cutting off the ends of Tex...
pmontra 3y 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.jpg 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 3y ago
  > ... screenshot ... And screenshots are, IMHO, one important reason it should always be the full date.
- ranting-moth 3y ago
  Wow, what the screenshot is showing is a candidate for a professional misconduct if we had a governing body.
- jquast 3y 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-right/ https://alesnosek.com/blog/2017/01/02/git-getting-the-timing...
- MaxBarraclough 3y ago
  I'm surprised that there seems to be no way to configure gitg to always show full datetimes.
- drpixie 3y 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.
unlikelytomato 3y ago
My favorite is when I see a photo posted to Google maps "1653 days 5 hours ago"
coding123 3y ago
At minimum it should say Friday Morning. Glad someone is fighting back on this practice.
brainzap 3y ago
yes please!
NikkiA 3y ago
I'll go further and say anything longer ago than an hour should show the date + time, with timezone.
fuster 3y 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 3y 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 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108174/characters/nm0001439
- kccqzy 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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
  - jiveturkey 3y ago
    not sure what the confusing part is here? 02 = 2002.
    - kevincox 3y ago
      You are assuming an American date format. The format of the date may come from 1. Your browser locale. 2. The developer's preference and ignoring the locale. 3. The server's configuration (so the operators preference). 4. Guessed based on your current network location. I guess if you are in the US using a US locale it is usually true if you are visiting a US site as almost all of these will select a US locale so it doesn't matter the source, but it is impossible to be sure. And if you live outside of the US or use a non-US locale then at least one of these will frequently return a different locale and you will have little way to know which format is being used.
    - yibg 3y ago
      Is it Aug 11 2002 or Nov 8 2003 or Nov 2 2008?
      - jiveturkey 3y ago
        I have never seen 2 digit years being used in YY/MM/DD formats. So I have pretty high certainty which place is the years. The month/day confusion is very real, but that isn't what parent complained about. In fact, if the site had used 4 digit years like 08/11/2002, as parent requests, it would still be equally confusing. So that was clearly not the point of contention.
dboreham 3y 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 3y 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.
rerdavies 3y 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-moth 3y ago
  I personally would find that quite upsetting.
  - rerdavies 3y ago
    I'd propose user-survey to the death at dawn at twenty paces.
- funcDropShadow 3y 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.
jameshart 3y 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.
jquast 3y 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!
- poorlyknit 3y 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.
dreamcompiler 3y 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 3y 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.
  - poorlyknit 3y 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"
amitizle 3y ago
I thought about that also a week ago
anigbrowl 3y ago
Yes, I'm sick of these cutesy approximations on social media as well, it screates more confusion than clarity.
dabedee 3y ago
Github does that and it always makes it very difficult to understand when something was actually done/committed.
- MisterKent 3y ago
  Seriously, of all the platforms that do this pattern, this one is the most user hostile.
- codazoda 3y 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 3y 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.
not_your_vase 3y 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.
- Moru 3y 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.
- xp84 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 https://live.last10k.com [2] https://hexdocs.pm/timex/Timex.html#from_now/3 https://hexdocs.pm/timex/Timex.html#from_now/3 [3] https://github.com/hbcondo/last10k_liveview/blob/main/lib/last10k_web/live/filings_live.ex#L138C1-L149C20 https://github.com/hbcondo/last10k_liveview/blob/main/lib/la...
Xenoamorphous 3y 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”.
- xp84 3y 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 3y 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.
snarfy 3y 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.
- layer8 3y 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.
  - funcDropShadow 3y ago
    Does this also work in a screenshot?
deckar01 3y ago
You don’t need time deltas for display. Just omit the prefix (left of the minute) that is equal to now.
codazoda 3y 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.
layer8 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
Url changed from https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/10/13/relative-time-labels/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2023/10/13/relative-time-labels/, which points to this.
novok 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  You can actually (finally!) turn this of in your preferences and see exact dates.
rokhayakebe 3y ago
How about showing both?
butz 3y ago
It's funny when OpenStreetMap "User blocks" page display status that "Ends in over 90 years".
fifticon 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
  - johnnyanmac 3y 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.
    - eashman 3y ago
      However, on mobile iOS Safari there’s no standard way to trigger a tooltip that I’m aware of.
- glaucon 3y ago
  >The crayon eating has gotten out of hand Beautifully put.
xp84 3y 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 3y 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-skin 3y 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 3y 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".
tlogan 3y ago
Yeah. For emails I use display time stamps extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/display-email-time-by-clo/kedlbojealkpdllmgjeciofngjeokhno https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/display-email-time...
tlogan 3y ago
The worst part is when you share screenshot of something: there are not actually dates so person receiving screenshots has no clue.
rvdginste 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
Fast forward 10^8 years, and the actual date will cause too much visual clutter.
temporallobe 3y 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 3y 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_cogs 3y ago
  See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881456
hnthrowaway0315 3y 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 3y ago
/u/epistasis said it best: “UI is communication, and UI designers have decided that mumbling is cool.”
- teddyh 3y ago
  Unclear communication increases repetition and confusion, which can be creatively interpreted as engagement, increasing ad revenue.
  - funcDropShadow 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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_ 3y 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 https://www.astralcodexten.com/archive
cushpush 3y ago
Always use the name of the day of the week, Tomorrow is vaguetalk for Future and Yesterday, past.
jks 3y 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.
Fanmade 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
Everything upload din the last 5 minutes should say the exact date.
joshstrange 3y 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 3y ago
Ca we do both, 1 year ago: 2022-1-1?
higeorge13 3y ago
Imagine in 100+ years, people watching youtube videos uploaded _1 century ago_.
HocusLocus 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
rerdavies 3y ago
The obvious solution: milliseconds since 1970/1/1T00:00:00Z. The best compromises make everyone equally unhappy. Either that or "Wednesday about teatime". /s 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 3y 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 3y 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.

798 points by microflash 3y ago

ctxc 3y 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.

jstanley 3y 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 3y 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"?
  - idbehold 3y ago
    The point is that both are technically correct. At 12:00am on January 1 that happens to fall on a Monday something that occurred 1 second ago can be considered to have taken place: last week (depending on when you consider weeks to start/end), last month, last year, yesterday, etc.
    - mynameisvlad 3y ago
      Sure, they’re both technically correct, but that wasn’t the question. The question was > 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"? Every single time display library I have seen will do as the poster explained, and show more granular information the closer it is (generally starting at “X seconds ago”). Your technicality is certainly true, but a strawman.
      - JdeBP 3y ago
        Actually, it's that question that is the straw man. jstanley's point is that to the reader "posted last week" could mean almost no time at all ago. It's not about the display library choosing to label recent things as this. It's about humans reading such a label and not receiving the intended information, because humans don't cut off what they understand "last week" to mean at some arbitrary 12-hours-ago mark.
        mynameisvlad 3y ago
        Except they do get the intended information. The label doesn’t exist in a vacuum; the user would have seen other examples showing the specificity at intervals other than “last week” which sensitizes them to the cutoff points. This is literally a non-problem. If a library behaved in the way the parent commenter makes them seem like, then, sure, they have a point. But they don’t. Something that occurred a second ago would say “a second ago”. Something that occurred 5 minutes and 43 seconds ago would say “6 minutes ago”, etc. There is no library in the world which takes a timestamp a second ago and outputs “a week ago” and pretending like there is is, literally, a strawman.
        jstanley 3y ago
        > the user would have seen other examples Yeah, I've seen enough examples to know that no 2 websites implement the same logic so I shouldn't try to second-guess anything more than what the text literally says.
      - mvdtnz 3y ago
        If the user needs to know the details of your "time display library" to disambiguate "last week" then you've already lost. It's bad UX. Stop doing it.
        mynameisvlad 3y ago
        But… users don’t. Literally no library out there does what the parent commenter claims they could do. They all use sensible cutovers for relative dates.
- kube-system 3y ago
  Most of the date libraries that do relative time formatting like this would use hours if it were hours ago.
variants 3y ago
Why would you need to look up lasts week date on a calendar
makeitdouble 3y 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.
yosito 3y 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?
mvdtnz 3y ago
How do you know where precision is needed?
mathijs 3y 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 3y 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.
- funcDropShadow 3y ago
  So instead of preferring actually locale-aware date formatting you would prefer fuzziness?
dolni 3y 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?

jstanley 3y 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"?

olddustytrail 3y ago
I think they meant "more than 24 hours" rather than "less". It makes more sense in context.
- tomjakubowski 3y 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
  - thfuran 3y ago
    I think you switched around your sixes and nines.
    - tomjakubowski 3y ago
      I don't think I mixed it up > No human uses “more that 24 hours” as the definition of “yesterday”. Computers, unfortunately, do. At 9pm on Oct 14, 6pm on Oct 13 was > 24 hours ago, and people would still call it "yesterday".
  - olddustytrail 3y ago
    I don't think they're saying it can't be more than 24 hours just that it can be less. Clearly it's confusingly worded so probably best if they just redo it.
    - tomjakubowski 3y ago
      agreed completely - "yesterday" usually includes times both greater than and less than 24 hours ago. People usually just mean… some time in the date previous to now. Roughly.

tapvt 3y ago

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

microflash 3y ago
There's a `--date` flag which you can use to control this behavior. Also, it depends on your git configuration.

djaro 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
  It looks like there isn't a revanced patch for that yet, but I bet there will be soon.
bbx 3y 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".
- dmd 3y ago
  Even better would be for it to say "November 2021".
  - typon 3y ago
    Where's the fun in that? Let's design heuristics that work culturally in some parts of the world and be imprecise instead!

echelon 3y 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqZLkzdNYuI

mvdtnz 3y ago
How do I hover on mobile?
- rerdavies 3y ago
  Long press.
  - mvdtnz 3y ago
    Are you sure? https://imgur.com/a/dsm4zL9 https://imgur.com/a/dsm4zL9
owenpalmer 3y 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.
microflash 3y 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.
3y ago

jacknews 3y 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.

mvdtnz 3y ago
Why? What's wrong with just the date?
- SpaceNoodled 3y ago
  Sometimes I turn my math brain off
- kube-system 3y ago
  Sometimes relative time is more user friendly or more accurately answers a question.
- tome 3y ago
  It significantly reduces mental exertion to have the calculation performed for you!
  - pintxo 3y ago
    The problem with this is that the dev cannot know which calculation I need!
    - tome 3y ago
      Right, and that's the case with every feature implemented in software. Showing both the precise datetime of creation and a "human readable ago" seems to cover a lot of bases that users seem to like, though. Recall, we're commenting on a thread that's proposing removing a feature that already exists (so presumably people want it).
      - myk9001 3y ago

solumunus 3y ago

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

klysm 3y ago
I fail to see how that enables any kind of meaningful scaling.
- solumunus 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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).

makeitdouble 3y 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_lishin 3y 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 3y 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 https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts?q=jira
  - pavel_lishin 3y ago
    Ooh, I'll see if I can do that this week.
- jbaber 3y ago
  I think I'm at 8 different greasemonkey scripts to manhandle Jira.
john_cogs 3y 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#show-exact-times-instead-of-relative-times https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/profile/preferences.html#sho...

sidlls 3y 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 3y 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?

CrzyLngPwd 3y 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 3y 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/time https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...

midasuni 3y 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.
- Izkata 3y ago
  Likewise on Firefox, doesn't seem to do anything despite the compatibility table saying it does.
- marcosdumay 3y 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.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    This is correct. It would be nice to have an option for the browser to format it for you. Especially since you can't reliably get the user's time zone on the server. I wrote some JS that watches the page for these and updates them to be more user friendly and use the user's locale. But it would be nice if this was the browser's problem to solve (and can consider things like non-locale preferences such as always showing the time across websites and how far relative times should stretch)
Analemma_ 3y 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.

fatih-erikli 3y 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/time 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 3y ago

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

pmontra 3y 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.jpg 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 3y ago
> ... screenshot ... And screenshots are, IMHO, one important reason it should always be the full date.
ranting-moth 3y ago
Wow, what the screenshot is showing is a candidate for a professional misconduct if we had a governing body.
jquast 3y 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-right/ https://alesnosek.com/blog/2017/01/02/git-getting-the-timing...
MaxBarraclough 3y ago
I'm surprised that there seems to be no way to configure gitg to always show full datetimes.
drpixie 3y 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.

unlikelytomato 3y ago

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

coding123 3y ago

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

brainzap 3y ago

yes please!

NikkiA 3y ago

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

fuster 3y 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 3y 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 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108174/characters/nm0001439

kccqzy 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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
- jiveturkey 3y ago
  not sure what the confusing part is here? 02 = 2002.
  - kevincox 3y ago
    You are assuming an American date format. The format of the date may come from 1. Your browser locale. 2. The developer's preference and ignoring the locale. 3. The server's configuration (so the operators preference). 4. Guessed based on your current network location. I guess if you are in the US using a US locale it is usually true if you are visiting a US site as almost all of these will select a US locale so it doesn't matter the source, but it is impossible to be sure. And if you live outside of the US or use a non-US locale then at least one of these will frequently return a different locale and you will have little way to know which format is being used.
  - yibg 3y ago
    Is it Aug 11 2002 or Nov 8 2003 or Nov 2 2008?
    - jiveturkey 3y ago
      I have never seen 2 digit years being used in YY/MM/DD formats. So I have pretty high certainty which place is the years. The month/day confusion is very real, but that isn't what parent complained about. In fact, if the site had used 4 digit years like 08/11/2002, as parent requests, it would still be equally confusing. So that was clearly not the point of contention.

dboreham 3y 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 3y 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.

rerdavies 3y 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-moth 3y ago
I personally would find that quite upsetting.
- rerdavies 3y ago
  I'd propose user-survey to the death at dawn at twenty paces.
funcDropShadow 3y 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.

jameshart 3y 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.

jquast 3y 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!

poorlyknit 3y 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.

dreamcompiler 3y 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 3y 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.
- poorlyknit 3y 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"

amitizle 3y ago

I thought about that also a week ago

anigbrowl 3y ago

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

dabedee 3y ago

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

MisterKent 3y ago
Seriously, of all the platforms that do this pattern, this one is the most user hostile.
codazoda 3y 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 3y 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.

not_your_vase 3y 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.

Moru 3y 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.
xp84 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 https://live.last10k.com [2] https://hexdocs.pm/timex/Timex.html#from_now/3 https://hexdocs.pm/timex/Timex.html#from_now/3 [3] https://github.com/hbcondo/last10k_liveview/blob/main/lib/last10k_web/live/filings_live.ex#L138C1-L149C20 https://github.com/hbcondo/last10k_liveview/blob/main/lib/la...

Xenoamorphous 3y 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”.

xp84 3y 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 3y 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.

snarfy 3y 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.

layer8 3y 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.
- funcDropShadow 3y ago
  Does this also work in a screenshot?

deckar01 3y ago

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

codazoda 3y 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.

layer8 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago

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

novok 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago
You can actually (finally!) turn this of in your preferences and see exact dates.

rokhayakebe 3y ago

How about showing both?

butz 3y ago

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

fifticon 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.
- johnnyanmac 3y 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.
  - eashman 3y ago
    However, on mobile iOS Safari there’s no standard way to trigger a tooltip that I’m aware of.
glaucon 3y ago
>The crayon eating has gotten out of hand Beautifully put.

xp84 3y 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 3y 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-skin 3y 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 3y 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".

tlogan 3y ago

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

tlogan 3y ago

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

rvdginste 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago

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

temporallobe 3y 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 3y 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_cogs 3y ago
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37881456

hnthrowaway0315 3y 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 3y ago

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

teddyh 3y ago
Unclear communication increases repetition and confusion, which can be creatively interpreted as engagement, increasing ad revenue.
- funcDropShadow 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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_ 3y 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 https://www.astralcodexten.com/archive

cushpush 3y ago

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

jks 3y 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.

Fanmade 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y ago

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

joshstrange 3y 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 3y ago

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

higeorge13 3y ago

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

HocusLocus 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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.

rerdavies 3y ago

The obvious solution: milliseconds since 1970/1/1T00:00:00Z. The best compromises make everyone equally unhappy. Either that or "Wednesday about teatime". /s 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 3y 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 3y 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.