Hello UI designers. Please stop putting present-relative dates on things. It’s bad. If you put “1 second ago” on some data and I leave the tab open, I will be dismayed when I look at it 3 hours later and the thing that I thought should have happened 3 hours ago happened 1 second ago. Before you say you are going to keep things up to date with javascript or websockets: no you aren’t. You’re going to fuck it up. Correction: you already fucked it up. 1 second ago.
Perhaps even worse is the idea that I care even less about temporal precision the further things get into the past. When viewing a piece of media I rarely care if it’s 2 years ago or 2y6m ago, but it turns out I really care about whether a particular piece of media is from Dec 2019 or Mar 2020. There is a big difference between a TV show that aired on September 9 2001 and September 13 2001. Just put the fucking date! It’s fewer characters than “about five years ago”, you are not saving space!
@glyph my take: relative dates are /extremely/ useful /when in a group with each other/, but anytime they're by themselves, plz no. (or, here's a shocking idea, DISPLAY BOTH FORMATS 😱)
@glyph yeah it's one of the worst thing I got to see UI wise. it's annoying everywhere. I wish they put both representations or an option to choose (some sites do!).
Tooltip is definitly better than just a relative date, but it still makes any kind of screenshots become a guessing game when said screenshot's date itself is lost (which usually happens when you're posting it antwhere)
In addition it gets even more confusing when sending such a screenshot to someone with another timezone
@glyph and at a minimum make it possible to know what time zone the time is displayed in. Ideally it would be possible to set a default time zone of the user’s choosing and to be able to dynamically change the representation to another time zone.
In general, the systems I care about have TZ=UTC, my browser is US/Chicago, and those I’m sharing my screen with are in one or more other time zones.
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