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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
by 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 agoIt’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 agoI 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 agoIt looks like there isn't a revanced patch for that yet, but I bet there will be soon.
- bbx 3y agoOh, 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 agoEven better would be for it to say "November 2021".
- typon 3y agoWhere's the fun in that? Let's design heuristics that work culturally in some parts of the world and be imprecise instead!
- Moru 3y agoWhat's wrong with 2021-11-21T15:10:35 ?
- dmd 3y agoYou mean 1637507435?
- pjscott 3y agoYes. As God intended when He created the heavens and the earth on January 1, 1970.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- layer8 3y agoThe “T”, mostly.
- barbazoo 3y agoTime portion not being useful I'd say.
- irrational 3y agoI’d prefer it to use the month name. Then it doesn’t matter if you write it November 12 2012 2012 November 12 12 November 2012 2012 12 November Etc.
- Horffupolde 3y agoUse the URL
- wds 3y ago[dead]
- bilekas 3y agoI was just thinking about that the other day..
- Y_Y 3y 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.
- jimmySixDOF 3y agoCould even be personalized so the date appears as "the same weekend you and Charlie went out on the boat"
- LordShredda 3y agoFunnily enough google collects enough data for that to be possible
- Freedom2 3y agoThat's precisely the joke, why bother restating it?
- Moru 3y agoMy old phones' timer said "Less than 1 minute" instead of saying 59 seconds... Everything less than one minute whas "Less than 1 minute".
- BD103 3y agoNot 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.
- o11c 3y agoThe 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.
- jjav 3y agoI 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 3y agoIIRC 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.
- jjav 3y ago> IIRC this started in the Mac finder with OSX 10.2. I see proper timestamps in Finder in Date Modified column.
- Cockbrand 3y agoRelative dates in Finder list view have been around since at least Mac OS 9.x, see for example this screenshot: https://i.stack.imgur.com/bdY7i.jpg https://i.stack.imgur.com/bdY7i.jpg
- troupo 3y agoIIRC the trend started with Twitter
- krater23 3y agoI feel like they regulary do this contests and are only working in making UI more shitty every day.
- HeavyStorm 3y agoHah, 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 3y agoEven 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 3y agoExactly, 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.
- cushpush 3y agoOne more significant digit solves this: 3.2 years ago
- krater23 3y agoI would have no plan when this was. Just writing the fucking date is the best solution.
- yonatan8070 3y agoExcept that saying "1.5 years ago" with a decimal would be 1 year and 6 months ago, and you won't want to do the conversions from a base 10 to base 12 for the month. Just write "October 21, 2020"
- Fanmade 3y agoWhich would be the worst date format. Just use ISO 8601 (2020-10-21) and you could even sort by the date.
- remram 3y agoISO 8601 is a long document which none of us can read and which specifies A LOT of different formats, including 2023-10-21, +0020231021, 2023-W42, 2023-294, and a lot of others (including duration specifiers). Citing RFC 3339 is usually a better idea, since in addition to be readable for free, it is limited to the date formats you are thinking about. My 2 cents on your preferred citation, keep preaching though! https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3339 With apologies for the delayed response, I got here from the weekly hackernewsletter.
- siva7 3y agoI sometimes really wonder who the heck greenlights such horrible UX at Google.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y 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.
- funcDropShadow 3y 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.