Post

I like the sites/apps that do both. You get a quick view (3 months ago), but can hover over or tap to get an exact timestamp.

Some places don't even show the date at all! I don't mind relative times generally, but if they are used they absolutely should also include the actual time somewhere, at the very least within a tooltip

You should at least be able to get the full date on a tooltip or click

Yes, github, very clever but WHAT WAS THE GODDAM DATE AND TIME?!

I'll (begrudgingly) allow it if they at least show you the exact date when hovering over or clicking that text

Looking at you, github...

Related: Jira doesn't accept "0" for time remaining. It needs a time unit, so it knows whether I mean 0 minutes, hours, days or weeks.

I agree!

For journalism it's a real fucking problem, because "this post was made somewhere between July 2025 and July 2026" or whatever is something you never wanna write.

I especially hate the sites where you can't even mouse over the fuzzy date to get the actual date

I deal with this problem in a major SIEM. Usually it shows timestamps but for some reason they decided that the page for viewing alerts would use these obnoxious relative times. I don't want to know an alert happened "a week ago", I want to see the exact timestamp.

It just says 2m, was this posted 2 minutes ago or two months ago?

Who asked for this bs??? Why do companies do this?

I see this as digital equivalent of how casino floor layouts are made to obscure the exits and not give anyone a sense of the passage of time. It is irritating, especially with how much disinformation has been turbocharged, having clear posted dates is helpful.

they think they're being soooo sophisticated and then don't even include the actual date on hover

Proto-AI summary Also for the love of God can excel stop doing that to anything that looks like a number or a date

Oh, my gods, yes. Stop with the fuzzy dates and give me back my full calendar timestamps. I can do basic math to figure out the fuzzy bit if I really need it.

1 year particularly sucks because is that 12 months or 23 months is a big difference.

Wow, seeing some crazy conspiracy theories about why this is. I've seen this code, and here's the real reason: it is hiding in dozens of different places like a viral reservoir, and every time someone tries to change it, it just re-emerges a couple days later

My guess is they think it keeps engagement up more if you fudge time spans. The post then can be viewed as being more legit or fresh over a longer period of time. Solid dates are easier to dismiss for people as “too old”. My guess is also that they did A/B testing and found this to be the case.