Hacker News Reader

Comment by buttercraft | Hacker News Reader

How did this "days ago" date trend ever get started? It's absolutely horrible.

Another trend I've seen is to spell out the full name of the month but then leave out the year. Gee, thanks for making me hover over every single date just to see what it actually is.

View on HN

It’s what most people want and what people have to keep calculating when you give them time stamps. If you are in a decision making position you’d want to do the same research to see what your users want.

I like to make it show the time stamp on hover / tap.

> I like to make it show the time stamp on hover / tap.

This is exactly what GitHub does (on hover). I'm not sure how they calculate what format to show it in on hover. For me, it's a good balance of getting a feel for the time at a glance while allowing you to see actual time on hover when you need it.

I can believe that in the general population that is what people want.

However, for the population of GitHub users, I am certain a significantly higher percentage desire precise timestamps. Maybe even in ISO 8601 / IETF RFC 3339.

Are you claiming that even among GitHub users the percentage desiring "days ago" is overwhelming? Based on what data?

If it doesn't explicitly mention the year, it's the current one. I think it's pretty great and reduces mental burden.

Maybe it reduces mental burden when looking at one or a few items, but it sure doesn't help when scanning a list of items.

I think relative time is good for things less than a week old, but anything other than that will use the full date. Discord's solution to it is really nice imo.

When ruby on rails launched it had a presentation thingy to do it. Then it started appearing everywhere.

I disagree, relative time is awesome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com