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I honestly don't understand why it's ever useful to die show relative timestamps over absolute ones. It's not hard to look at a date or time and understand how

by saghm 11mo ago

I honestly don't understand why it's ever useful to die show relative timestamps over absolute ones. It's not hard to look at a date or time and understand how far back it was; it's not even that I can do the math to figure out the relative time, but that the relative version isn't even worth bothering to calculate because the absolute one is just as intuitive. If it's currently February 20XX and I see a timestamp of July 20XX-1, I know how long it's been since then, and I don't care about the number of months. If it's February and I see the timestamp "7 months ago" I don't immediately know it's July without at least doing some small amount of thinking, like "okay, a year before five months from now, so July" (which is especially silly because now I'm having to lean even more into relative times just to be able to get back to the absolute date). Seeing the exact date and also potentially know other pertinent facts like the season ("that picture was from the summer"), holidays ("it must be from the 4th of July barbecue"), etc. Is there something I'm missing here about why people might prefer relative timestamps? I genuinely can't tell if everyone kind of universally hates them or if this is one of those things where my brain just works differently than a lot of other people.

goatlover 11mo ago
Posts for one thing like yours an hour ago as of this post. Sometimes people want to see how old content is at a glance. Like how long ago did someone log in?
- saghm 11mo ago
  I guess I just don't find the relative timestamp to be a more intuitive way of seeing that. If I see today's date and a time this morning, I don't need to "translate" that into an exact number of hours because "12 hours ago" isn't more meaningful to me than "this morning", an "2 minutes ago" is likely going to be wrong quickly (or require a technical measure to keep accurate, and given that the relative timestamp already arguably is more work to implement, that's now two extra things added to try to solve a problem that I don't really understand to exist in the first place). Having thought through a bunch of different orders of magnitude of time (time in the past measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years), I'm confident that I'd personally find the actual date and time to be more intuitive in every single one of them. What I'm not confident in is whether that would be the case for everyone else or not. I don't think there would be anything wrong with someone feeling differently than me, and if it turns out I'm in the minority, I wouldn't have any trouble accepting it, but it feels so fundamentally disconnected with the way I think about things that I have trouble conceiving of it other than as a hypothetical.
quesera 11mo ago
> Is there something I'm missing here about why people might prefer relative timestamps? I think most people are uncomfortable parsing timestamps for small-interval differences, e.g. `2025-12-19T16:28:09+00:00` for "31 seconds ago". For larger intervals, I agree that timestamps are more useful. "1 day ago" is a particular bugbear of mine. One day meaning, 13 hours, or meaning 35 hours? Sometimes that's important! The original advice when relative timestamps became a thing was to choose based on the activity level of the content. If new content is constantly appearing and older stuff fades out of relevance quickly, then choose relative timestamps. Otherwise, use absolute timestamps. The worst is inconsistency, and the best is sometimes both (when presented in a discoverable and convenient way -- hover text used to be that way, but this degrades on mobile).
- saghm 11mo ago
  To clarify, I don't mean to literally imply an exact timestamp format. Showing something like "December 19, 2025 4:28 PM" or "19 December 2025 16:28" seems strictly better to me than "31 seconds ago" because it doesn't either become inaccurate quickly or require having the page update in real-time.

by saghm 11mo ago

goatlover 11mo ago

Posts for one thing like yours an hour ago as of this post. Sometimes people want to see how old content is at a glance. Like how long ago did someone log in?

saghm 11mo ago
I guess I just don't find the relative timestamp to be a more intuitive way of seeing that. If I see today's date and a time this morning, I don't need to "translate" that into an exact number of hours because "12 hours ago" isn't more meaningful to me than "this morning", an "2 minutes ago" is likely going to be wrong quickly (or require a technical measure to keep accurate, and given that the relative timestamp already arguably is more work to implement, that's now two extra things added to try to solve a problem that I don't really understand to exist in the first place). Having thought through a bunch of different orders of magnitude of time (time in the past measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years), I'm confident that I'd personally find the actual date and time to be more intuitive in every single one of them. What I'm not confident in is whether that would be the case for everyone else or not. I don't think there would be anything wrong with someone feeling differently than me, and if it turns out I'm in the minority, I wouldn't have any trouble accepting it, but it feels so fundamentally disconnected with the way I think about things that I have trouble conceiving of it other than as a hypothetical.

quesera 11mo ago

> Is there something I'm missing here about why people might prefer relative timestamps? I think most people are uncomfortable parsing timestamps for small-interval differences, e.g. `2025-12-19T16:28:09+00:00` for "31 seconds ago". For larger intervals, I agree that timestamps are more useful. "1 day ago" is a particular bugbear of mine. One day meaning, 13 hours, or meaning 35 hours? Sometimes that's important! The original advice when relative timestamps became a thing was to choose based on the activity level of the content. If new content is constantly appearing and older stuff fades out of relevance quickly, then choose relative timestamps. Otherwise, use absolute timestamps. The worst is inconsistency, and the best is sometimes both (when presented in a discoverable and convenient way -- hover text used to be that way, but this degrades on mobile).

saghm 11mo ago
To clarify, I don't mean to literally imply an exact timestamp format. Showing something like "December 19, 2025 4:28 PM" or "19 December 2025 16:28" seems strictly better to me than "31 seconds ago" because it doesn't either become inaccurate quickly or require having the page update in real-time.