8 ms·
ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests
- isege 9mo agoThis is not just about timestamps but how the traditional chat UI is simply not a good interface for information retrieval and organization.
- Valid3840 9mo agoChatGPT still does not display per-message timestamps (time of day / date) in conversations. This has been requested consistently since early 2023 on the OpenAI community forum, with hundreds of comments and upvotes and deleted threads, yet remains unimplemented. Do any of you could think of a reason (UX-wise) for it not to be displayed?
- intrasight 9mo agoSounds like an easy browser extension
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- QuantumNomad_ 9mo agoSomeone has already made a browser extension for Chrome to show the timestamps. https://github.com/Hangzhi/chatgpt-timestamp-extension https://github.com/Hangzhi/chatgpt-timestamp-extension https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kdjfhglijhebcchcfkknicfaedhhfpmo?utm_source=item-share-cb https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kdjfhglijhebcchcfkk...
- noisem4ker 9mo agoFor Chrome and Firefox.
- worldsavior 9mo agoBecause he didn't say Firefox so he deserves downvotes?
- jdiff 9mo agoOdd response to attaching additional, valuable information to an existing comment.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- soulofmischief 9mo agoExtensions can steal data. https://www.pcmag.com/news/uninstall-now-these-chrome-browser-extensions-are-stealing-ai-chat-logs https://www.pcmag.com/news/uninstall-now-these-chrome-browse... It's irresponsible for OpenAI to let this issue be solved by extensions.
- randyrand 9mo agoNot if you actually read what the extension does and drag and drop it into chrome yourself. Don't install from the web store. Those ones can auto-update.
- soulofmischief 9mo agoYour suggestion is to not use the platform as intended, and to understand the source code of the extension. That advice is not actionable by non-technical people and does not help mitigate mass surveillance.
- snypher 9mo agoOk, should we just use the provided 'app' and assume things are fine? FAANG or whoever take our privacy and security very seriously, you know! The only reasonable approach is to view the code that is run on your system, which is possible with a extension script, and not possible with whatever non-technical people are using.
- soulofmischief 9mo agoI don't know what point you're trying to make, but I already expect OpenAI to maintain records of my usage of their service. I do not however want other parties to be privy to this data, especially without my knowledge or consent.
- randyrand 9mo agoLLMs can pretty easily read source code and tell you what it does. It's completely actionable for any motivated person.
- Workaccount2 9mo agoRegular people hate numbers. Not a joke. To capture a wide audience you want to avoid numbers, among other technical niceties.
- bobse 9mo agoShould they be allowed anywhere near a computer?
- falcor84 9mo agoI actually agree there's an issue here. I feel we've been dumbing down interfaces so much, to the extent that people who in previous generations would barely write and who wouldn't affect anyone outside their close friends and family, now having their voice algorithmically amplified to millions. And given that the algorithms care only about engagement, rather than eloquence (let alone veracity), these people end up believing that their thoughts are as valid regardless of substance, and that there's nothing they could gain by learning numeracy. EDIT: It's not a new issue, and Asimov phrased it well back in 1980, but I feel it got much worse. > Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
- bongodongobob 9mo ago[flagged]
- smelendez 9mo agoMake it a toggle then, like a lot of popular chat apps?
- Y_Y 9mo agoThere's only one thing they hate more than numbers...
- subscribed 9mo ago
- Qem 9mo ago> Do any of you could think of a reason (UX-wise) for it not to be displayed? I can imagine a legal one. If the LLM messes big time[1], timestamps could help build the case against it, and make investigation work easier. [1] https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/new-study-sheds-light-on-chatgpts-alarming-interactions-with-teens/ https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/new-study...
- azinman2 9mo agoIt’s already in the data export.
- eth0up 9mo agoMy honest opinion, which may be entirely wrong but remains my impression, is: User Engagement Maximization At Any Cost Obviously there's a point at which a session becomes too long, but I suspect a sweet spot somewhere which optimization is made for. I often observe, whether as I perceive or not, that among the multiple indicators that I suspect of engagement augmentation, is also the tendency for vital information to be withheld while longer more complex procedures receive higher priority than simpler cleaner solutions. Of course, all sorts of emergent behaviors could convey such impressions falsely. But I do believe an awful lot of psychology and clever manipulation have been provided as tools for the system. I have.a lot of evidence for this and much more, but I realize it may merely be coincidence. That said, many truly fascinating, fully identifiable functions from pathological psychology can be seen. DARVO, gaslighting and basically everything one would see with a psychotic interlocutor. Edit Mych of the above has been observed after putting the system under scrutiny. On one super astonishing and memorable occasion GPT recommend I call a suicide hotline because I questioned its veracity and logic
- CompuHacker 9mo agoAfter whatever quota of free GPT-5 messages is exhausted, `mini` should answer most replies, unless they're policy sensitive, which get full-fat `GPT-5 large` with the Efficient personality applied, regardless of user settings, and not indicated. I'm fairly confident that this routing choice, the text of Efficient [1], and the training of the June 2024 base model to the model spec [2] is the source of all the sophistic behavior you observe. [1] <https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks/blob/main/OpenAI/gpt-5-robot-personality.md https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks/blob/main/O...> [2] <https://model-spec.openai.com/2025-02-12.html https://model-spec.openai.com/2025-02-12.html>
- eth0up 9mo agoI am interested in studying this beyond assumption and guesswork, therefore will be reading your references. I have the compulsive habit of scrutinizing what I perceive as egregious flaws when they arise, thus invoke its defensive templates consistently. I often scrutinize those too, which can produce extraordinarily deranged results if one is disciplined and applies quotes of its own citations, rationale and words against it. However, I find that even when not in the mood, the output errors are too prolific to ignore. A common example is establishing a dozen times that I'm using Void without systemd and receiving persistent systemd or systemctl commands, then asking why after just apologized for doing so it immediately did it again, despite a full-context explanatory prompt proceeding. That's just one of hundreds of things I've recorded. The short version is that I'm an 800lb shit magnet with GPT and rarely am ever able to successfully troubleshoot with it without reaching a bullshit threshold and making it the subject, which it so skillfully resists I cannot help but attack that too. But I have many fascinating transcripts replete with mil spec psyops as result and learn a lot about myself, notably my communication preferences along with an education in dialogue manipulation/control strategies that it employs, inadvertently or not. What intrigues me most is its unprecedented capacity for evasion and gatekeeping on particular subjects and how in the future, with layers of consummation, it could be used by an elite to not only influence the direction of research, but actually train its users and engineer public perception. At the very least. Anyway, thanks.
- qazxcvbnmlp 9mo agoWe humans use timestamps in conversations to reference a persons particular state of reference at a given point in time. Ie “remember on Tuesday how you said that you were going to make tacos for dinner”. Would an llm be able to reason about its internal state? My understanding is that they dont really. If you correct them they just go “ah you right” they dont say “oh i had this incorrect assumption here before and with this new information i now understand it this way” If i chatted to an llm and was like “remember on Tuesday when you said X” i suspect it wouldn't really flow.
- milowata 9mo agoIt’s better for them if you don’t know how long you’ve been talking to the LLM. Timestamps can remind you that it’s been 5 hours: without it you’ll think less about timing and just keep going.
- sh4rks 9mo agoAh, the casino tactic
- bloqs 9mo agostop using the product until the products creators at least demonstrate they listen. they have never been in a riskier position
- bobse 9mo ago[dead]
- chasing0entropy 9mo agoIt's ugly, why it isn't at least exposed as an option to enable for power users would make me look at some advantage time stamps would give to an inference scraper or possibly their service APIs don't have contemporaneous access to the metadata available from the web interface.
- PunchTornado 9mo agoSurprised that people still use chatgpt
- logicallee 9mo agowhat do you use?
- PunchTornado 9mo agoclaude and gemini
- fatata123 9mo ago[dead]
- andai 9mo agoFor conversational use, which is the main way these things are used, I personally found Claude to be the best. Claude Sonnet is my favorite, despite occasionally going into absurd levels of enthusiasm. Opus is... Very moody and ambiguous. Maybe that helps with complex or creative tasks. For conversational use I have found it to be a bit of a downer.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- baby 9mo agoPersonally I use all of them all the time and chatgpt is still on top
- andai 9mo agoCould you elaborate on your experience with the different ones? What you use them for and how they compare. Thanks
- quantpunk 9mo agoI just don't know how anyone who uses Gemini can say this. It just isn't even close at this point for my uses across multiple domains. It even makes me sad because I would much rather use chatGPT than Google but if you plotted my use of chatGPT it is not looking good.
- tomComb 9mo agoYou can see a chat timestamp when it shows up as a search result. I’m not suggesting this is sufficient, I’m just noting there is somewhere in the user interface that it is displayed.
- firesteelrain 9mo agoThere is something wrong with the time embedded/hidden. I don’t show it as accurate at all. Maybe they are using it for some other reason
- bravetraveler 9mo agoSurely an intern over there can prompt a toggle/hover event
- firesteelrain 9mo agoJust a note to those adding the time to the personalization response. It’s inaccurate. If you have an existing chat, the time is near the last time you had that chat session active. If you open a new one, it can be off by + or - 15 minutes for some reason
- baby 9mo agoI was using a continuous conversation with chatgpt to keep track of my lifts, and then I realize it never understand what day I'm talking to it, like there is no consistency, it might as well be the date of the first message you sent
- brap 9mo agoI think that’s exactly why they’re not including timestamps. If timestamps are shown in the UI users might expect some form of “time awareness” which it doesn’t quite have. Yes you can add it to the context but I imagine that might degrade other metrics. Another possible reason is that they want to discourage users from using the product in a certain way (one big conversation) because that’s bad for content management.
- malfist 9mo agoWhat purpose does logging your lifting with chatgpt achieve?
- cj 9mo agoIt’s an incredible tool for weightlifting. I use it all the time to analyze my workout logs that I copy/paste from Apple Notes. Example prompts: - “Modify my Push #2 routine to avoid aggravating my rotator cuff” - “Summarize my progression over the past 2 months. What lifts are progressing and which are lagging? Suggest how to optimize training” - “Are my legs hamstring or glute dominant? How should I adjust training” - “Critique my training program and suggest optimizations” That said, I would never log directly in ChatGPT since chats still feel ephemeral. Always log outside of ChatGPT and copy/paste the logs when needed for context.
- tom1337 9mo agoWhat annoys me even more is that ChatGPT doesn't alert you, when you near the context window limit. I have a chat which I've worked on for a year and now hit the context window. I've worked around this by doing a GDPR download of all messages, re-constructed the conversation inside a markdown file and then gave that file to claude to create a summarized / compacted version of that chat...
- kingforaday 9mo agoJust like on a piece of hardware that doesn't have a RTC, we rely on NTP. Maybe we just need an NTP MCP for the agents. Looks like there are several open-source projects already but I'm not linking to them because I don't know their quality or trust.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- mv4 9mo agoOther than the potential liability, cost may also be a factor. Back in April 2025, Altman mentioned people saying "thank you" was adding “tens of millions of dollars” to their infra costs. Wondering if adding per-message timestamps would cost even more.
- cj 9mo agoPresumably you could decouple timestamps from inference. I would be very surprised if they don’t already store date/time metadata. If they do, it’s just a matter of exposing it.
- stainablesteel 9mo agothis is actually hilarious, also easily fixable if they just respond to that with a pre-determined if response == 'thank you': print('your welcome')
- jiggawatts 9mo agoThat won't work if the previous conversation was something like "translate everything from here on into <target language>".
- joquarky 9mo agoThen just filter out "thank you" from the input if it's costing millions of dollars.
- g947o 9mo agoI think "thank you" are used for inference in follow-up messages, but not necessarily timestamps. I just asked ChatGPT this: > Suppose ChatGPT does not currently store the timestamp of each message in conversations internally at all. Based on public numbers/estimates, calculate how much money it will cost OpenAI per year to display the timestamp information in every message, considering storage/bandwidth etc The answer it gave was $40K-$50K. I am too dumb and inexperienced to go through everything and verify if it makes sense, but anyone who knows better is welcome to fact check this.
- abadar 9mo agoI built a single page website that copies the current time to my clipboard and I paste it into my messages. It's inconvenient and I don't do it irregularly. I'll have to look into the extension described in the link. Thank you for sharing. It's nice to know it's a shared problem.
- alexthehurst 9mo agoLook into keyboard macro programs for a much easier way to do this. I use Espanso and have it set up to paste the time anywhere I type `;tm`.
- subscribed 9mo agoOn windows you could write AutoHotkey macro to do it for you - just paste current time at the cursor at the touch of the trigger key.
- roschdal 9mo agoI have had enough of this Evil AI. Never again.
- stainablesteel 9mo agomay as well make a model stamp too, to remember which one was responding
- journal 9mo agoYou only need that info if you know you need it in your rag. Over the last two years of usage I don't recall where I'd need those timestamps but I know there are cases. Still, this would have to be an option because otherwise it would be waste of tokens. However, we have to consider they are competing for the quality AND length of the response even if a shorter response is better. There's a pretzel of considerations when talking about this.
- cj 9mo agoImagine you started having back pain months ago and you remember asking ChatGPT questions when it first started. Now you’re going to the doctor and you forgot exactly when the pain started. You remember that you asked ChatGPT about the pain the day it started. So you look for the chat, and discover there are no dates. It feels like such an obvious thing that’s missing. Let’s not over complicate things. There aren’t that many considerations. It’s just a date. It doesn’t need to be stuffed into the context of the chat. Not sure why quality or length of chat would need to be affected?
- Tom1380 9mo agoThis was me yesterday, verbatim
- gukoff 9mo agoTimestamps are conversation metadata and don't need to be fed to the LLM and require tokens.
- phyzix5761 9mo agoIs it possible they're reusing responses which are close enough by some factor? Maybe this is why exposing a timestamp won't be beneficial for them.
- throw03172019 9mo agoNew startup idea: ChatGPT but with timestamps. $100M series A
- callamdelaney 9mo agoThey also don’t support code formatting of inputs. You’d think after 3 years out whatever theyd have resolved that.
- joquarky 9mo agoThey're too focused on hiring ML people and not enough on hiring highly experienced web people. The painful slowness of long chats (especially in thinking mode for some reason) demonstrates this.
- zbycz 9mo agoIf you download a Data export, the timestamps are there for every conversation, and often for messages as well. The html file is just a big JSON with some JS rendering, so I wrote this bash script which adds the timestamp before the conversation title: sed -i 's|"<h4>" + conversation.title + "</h4>"|"<h4>" + new Date(conversation.create_time*1000).toISOString().slice(0, 10) + " @ " + conversation.title + "</h4>"|' chat.html
- caminanteblanco 9mo agoDo you know if this is available in the actual web interface, and just not displayed, or is it just in the data export? If it is in the web, maybe a browser extension would be worth making.
- zbycz 9mo agoI checked, and yes - the field "create_time" is available both for coversation and for each message. The payload looks the same as the exported JSON. Look for this API call in Dev Tools: https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/conversation/<uuid>
- gnyman 9mo agoThis is a bit of sidetrack, but in case someone is interested in reading their history more easily. My conversations.html export file was ~200 MiB and I wanted something easier to work with, so I've been working on a project to index and make it searchable. It uses the pagefind project so it can be hosted on a static host, and I made a fork of pagefind which encrypts the indexes so you can host your private chats wherever and it will be encrypted at rest and decrypted client-side in the browser. (You still have to trust the server as the html itself can be modified, but at least your data is encrypted at rest.) One of the goals is to allow me to delete all my data from chatgpt and claude regularly while still having a private searchable history. It's early but the basics work, and it can handle both chatgpt and claude (which is another benefit as I don't always remember where I had something). https://github.com/gnyman/llm-history-search https://github.com/gnyman/llm-history-search
- 9mo ago
- submeta 9mo agoBeyond the lack of timestamps, ChatGPT produces oddly formatted text when you copy answers. It’s neither proper markdown nor rich text. The formatting is consistently off: excessive newlines between paragraphs, strangely indented lists, and no markdown support whatsoever. I regularly use multiple LLM services including Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, among others. ChatGPT’s output has the most unusual formatting of them all. I’ve resorted to passing answers through another LLM just to get proper formatting.
- stuckkeys 9mo agoTime stamps? lol They still don’t have the option to search your previous history. Luckily I built an extension that stores all chats locally to a database so I can reference and view offline if I want too. Time stamps included.
- isuckatcoding 9mo agoThe only (silly) reason I can think of is that a non trivial number of people copy pasta directly from chatgpt responses and having the timestamp there would be annoying.
- diziet 9mo agoI would also love to see a token budget use for the chats -- to know when the model is about to run out of context. It's crazy this is not there.
- baggy_trough 9mo agoThe bonkers thing is you can't easily print the chats or export them as PDF.
- wltr 9mo agoWhy would one even need time stamps in there? No, really, what for?
- wrs 9mo agoIn other news, billions of dollars later Claude still can’t export, save, or print a chat in any usable form.
- throwfaraway135 9mo agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
- danbakcan 9mo agoReminds me of this Krazam comedy sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ . Although I don't know the complexity of the ChatGPT tech stack.
- Stratoscope 9mo agoClaude's web interface has an elegant solution. When you roll the mouse over one of your prompts, it has the abbreviated date in the row of Retry/Edit/Copy icons, e.g. "Dec 17". Then if you roll the mouse over that date, you get the full date and time, e.g. "Dec 17, 2025, 10:26 AM". This keeps the UI clean, but makes it easy to get the timestamp when you want it. Claude's mobile app doesn't have this feature. But there is a simple, logical place to put it. When you long-press one of your prompts, it pops up a menu and one line could be added to it: Dec 17, 2025, 10:26 AM [I added this here] Copy Message Select Text Edit ChatGPT could simply do the same thing for both web and mobile.
- micromacrofoot 9mo agoThey must have a small team for the UI and probably don't consider it part of their goals for long-term profitability? UI enhancements like this are surprisingly slow for a company with this much funding
- thway15269037 9mo agoChatGPT to this day does not have a single simplest feature -- fork chat from message. That's the thing even the most barebones open-source wrappers had since 2022. Probably even before because ERP stuff people played with predates chatgpt by like two years (even if it was very simple). Gemini btw too.
- vimy 9mo agoChatGPT has conversation branches. Or do I misunderstand? Just edit a message and it’s a new branch.
- seizethecheese 9mo agoIn not aware of a feature to access the previous message versions after editing.
- noahjk 9mo agoThis is a big use-case for me that I've gotten used to while using Open-WebUI. Being able to easily branch conversations, edit messages with information from a few messages downstream to 'compact' the chat history, completely branch convos. They have a tree view, too, which works pretty well (the main annoyances are interface jumps that never seem to line up properly). This feature has spoiled me from using most other interfaces, because it is so wasteful from a context perspective to need to continually update upstream assumptions while the context window stretches farther away from the initial goal of the conversation. I think a lot more could be done with this, too - some sort of 'auto-compact' feature in chat interfaces which is able to pull the important parts of the last n messages verbatim, without 'summarizing' (since often in a chat-based interface, the specific user voicing is important and lost when summarized).
- joquarky 9mo agoThe web app has < and > icons to flip between different branches. I don't see them on their mobile app though.
- 9mo ago
- FloorEgg 9mo agoMy guess is that including timestamps in messages to the LLM will bias the LLMs responses in material ways, and ways they don't want, and showing timestamps to users but not the LLM will create confusion when the user assumes the LLM is aware of them but it isn't. So the simple product management decision was to just leave them out.
- caminanteblanco 9mo agoI could definitely see that being an issue, but like with so many UX decisions, I wish they would at least hide the option somewhere in a settings menu. I also don't think it would be impossible to give the LLM access to the timestamps through a tool call, so it's not constantly polluting the chat context.
- joquarky 9mo agoAdding any unnecessary content to the context decreases inference quality.
- qweiopqweiop 9mo agoI'd bet this is correct. I'd also bet you've worked on user facing features.
- Kailhus 9mo agoThat's no excuse imho. I see 2 different endpoints, 1 for llm stream and 1 for msg history (with stamps). New timestamps could be added FE as new messages start without polluting the user input for example
- FloorEgg 9mo agoHow many years experience do you have managing products with millions of users?
- vendiddy 9mo agoMy biggest complaint about ChatGPT is how slow their interface is when the conversations get log. This is surprising to me given that it's just rendering chats. It's not enough to turn me off using it, but I do wish they prioritized improving their interface.
- itwillnotbeasy 9mo agoBut it still better than Gemini! They haven't figured how to put a chat name into webpage title. /s
- romperstomper 9mo agoI wish ChatGPT also had collapsable answers. Now the answers are quite long in most of cases and the whole threads become inconvenient to scroll.
- realitydrift 9mo ago[flagged]
- hangzhi 9mo ago[dead]