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This is a ridiculous argument - relative dates are an enormous usability improvement for actual users, who don't care about machine-readable timestamps or the i
by bryne 14y ago
This is a ridiculous argument - relative dates are an enormous usability improvement for actual users, who don't care about machine-readable timestamps or the incredible mess that is timezones.
Twitter also doesn't give a fuck about archival via screenshots. I'm pretty hard-pressed to imagine who would, actually.
- aaronpk 14y agoI'm guessing they do actually care about screenshots, given that they have been recently restricting the ways they allow people to display tweets. They did change the format they used when displaying individual tweets, I'm guessing this was intentional.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- bryne 14y agoI don't think they care about screenshots specifically, but they certainly do intend Twitter.com/.app to be the primary or only method that tweets are displayed, ever. To this end, relative dates are great. You do have a good point that touches on the dilemma of the internet archivist, but this is certainly a problem easier to solve than the ones faced by people attempting to preserve software or video games, for example.
- stephengillie 14y agoHow is the relative timestamp not machine-readable? Can the computer not be programmed to parse If (4_characters_after_timestamp == " ago") {$timeoftweet = $now+$timestamp} ?
- bryne 14y agoSure, but that seems harder than attempting to shame developers into changing the way they display timestamps.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kineticflow 14y agoNot every website is in English.
- thinkingisfun 14y agoGive it some time.
- vlisivka 14y agoUntil none of them will be in English? Which dialect of Chinese you like most?
- mgurlitz 14y agoOne of the author's points is that relative dates discard information. 10:37 and 10:36 are both encoded as "9 hours ago," and therefore you can't map back to absolute dates without potentially losing order.
- icebraining 14y agoThat's a matter of implementation, not a specific property of relative dates, though.
- Lozzer 14y agoIf you're parsing from a real time feed, then that's fair enough. But if not $now isn't appropriate.
- electic 14y agoI disagree. I think the date should be there so I know exactly when it happened. This is especially critical in realtime systems. I have seen some horrid relative date instances. On Pinterest, for example, I have seen "about a year ago". Really?
- jamesaguilar 14y agoIf you can recognize cases where timestamps are important, you should be able to recognize cases where they aren't, too. Why does it matter exactly when a Pinterest item was pinned? Answer: for the vast majority of cases, it simply doesn't.
- run4yourlives 14y agoBut the stupidity is that you are taking away something for no good reason. You already know the date of the pin. You figure it's important to show this, but then you make it completely useless instead of providing the already useful piece of information you actually had.
- lucajona 14y agoProviding perfect information isn't always as important as providing information that's quick and easy for people to process. Take a piece of information like '12 Apr 2012 10:09 AM PST'--there's a fair bit of mental arithmetic required to work out how long ago that was, if 'how long ago' is important to you. And it's different arithmetic depending on whether you're looking at it on the 12th of April (time zone adjustments, crossing noon)or the 14th of June (how many days in April and March). Multiply this by the number of dates on a screen, and you might end up with a lot of information noise. A lot of the time, a quick, rough idea of 'how long ago it was' is really helpful. I wouldn't be so quick to label relative dates as stupid. Information overload is a real problem for humans, not so much for computers. It really depends on the circumstances, but for most UIs designed to be read by people, relative dates can work really well.
- 14y ago
- run4yourlives 14y ago"More than one year ago" - Actual Facebook date. What does this mean? Is this picture older or newer than the other picture, also labeled "More than one year ago"?
- dbecker 14y agoThe problem you are describing isn't a problem with relative dates. It is simply imprecision. You can make relative dates that are precise (e.g. 783 days and 4 hours ago), and you can make absolute dates that are imprecise (e.g. 2010).
- run4yourlives 14y ago783 days and 4 hours ago is even worse! What is that, like two years ago, oh maybe just over 2 years, oh shit no just under... We have a standardized date system. It's been in use around the globe for years. It works. Please use it.
- Aaronontheweb 14y agoNow you're just being pedantic - displaying the number of days since a picture was taken is not worse than not being able to differentiate past 12 moths.
- polyfractal 14y agoNo, he isn't being pedantic. It's a real, valid usability issue. "783 days and 4 hours ago" really is worse. If I am browsing a photo and look at that, my first reaction is "That photo was taken a long time ago". If my buddy asks when that happened, I'll have to start doing some simple math in my head. "Uhh, around two years ago? So what, that's 2010?" Simply putting the date would have been a much friendly solution. You know immediately that it was "a long time ago" because everyone knows what the current year is. And you know what year immediately. Conversely, on short scales it's opposite. I don't really care if a post was on Monday or Tuesday (usually). I care that it was recent. Providing the exact timestamp doesn't help. Both have their uses.
- mehulkar 14y agoI'm an actual user who doesn't really care about machine-readable timestamps and I would prefer absolute dates. The gmail solution in post works for me too.
- indiecore 14y agoWhy not both? if the date is less than a couple of days old (or whatever threshold works for you) display a relative date. This is useful because in the short term relative dates are more useful to the user. If it's older than the threshold display a YYYY-MM-DD H:m:s or whatever format floats your boat.
- eevilspock 14y agoIt's much more sensationalist and page hit attracting to make absolute black or white claims rather than something nuanced. How many hits would "When to use relative versus absolute time" get? It's on the HN front page. Look at this thread. The joke's on us.
- acdha 14y agoThe best part: Twitter actually already does something very similar what he suggests, with their relative dates having a data-time attribute containing the Unix timestamp for each tweet. If he wants to throw away source information and store pixels representing how a particular browser rendered it, well, that's not Twitter's problem. His microdata example is also only write if you having upgraded to HTML5, in which case <time> is obviously better.
- rio517 14y agoI couldn't disagree with you more. It would be relatively trivial to adjust a date for a users local timezone - as if often done.
- spullara 14y agoTwitter dates include machine readable timestamps in the markup. Also, you should be using tweet embeds which will remain up to date :)
- briandear 14y agoI totally agree. UX should not be based on some engineer's idea of what might be useful but on what might be useful to the actual user. Seeing August 22 doesn't mean much to me because I don't constantly look at my calender, but seeing 1 day ago or "yesterday" lets me know when something happened without me trying to remember what today's date is. However, that being say, I thing relative dates do have a point of diminishing returns. For me, past a week is when I'd prefer to see actual dates. I do agree that "over a year ago" is pretty vague at not as useful to the user as "August 2011." The word "about" gets ambiguous when dealing with longer spans of time. Obviously "about" is ambiguous by definition, but the degree of ambiguity increases as one goes further away from the event.
- mvgoogler 14y agoI agree. I read that article as "Don't use relative dates - it makes it hard for me to scrape your content".
- tripzilch 14y agoI dunno, I find the GMail inbox less usable for pretty much the exact reason he gives in the article. When I see an unread mail with "yesterday" or "one day ago", I'd like to know whether this mail--that I apparently overlooked--was sent yesterday morning or evening, so I can know whether the person expected me to reply yesterday or today when I see it.