4 ms·

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
      The idea of rendering relative dates instead of the actual dates caught up about 10 maybe 15 years ago (a relative date here, yes). I think -- but don't take my word for it -- it was Jeff Atwood who started advocating for it. So we might be talking not about removing a feature, but correcting a mistake here :)
• mvdtnz 3y ago
  "Significantly"? Are you sure?
• myk9001 3y ago
  What are some situations where you find calculating the relative date useful? Personally, if I care about a timestamp at all it's because I want to compare it to another date (maybe a past date, maybe a present or future one): a deadline, an event, a birthday. Relative dates actually make such comparisons harder. On the other hand, seeing an actual date like 2022/10/03 it's dead simple to tell that was a year ago, it's equally easy to tell whether something happened this year, or last month, or two days ago, etc.
  • johnnyanmac 3y ago
    we're talking about a casual context, so the average user doesn't need an exact time stamp on when a picture was taken. The average person doesn't talk in time stamps, so the paradigm was shifted to display how people communicated. Another nitpick is that relative dates solve the date format issue. No need to fuss over YYYY/MM/DD or DD/MM/YYYY or any other permutation, but we all can agree on when "7 months ago" was.