When was '2 weeks ago' and did it come before or after '2 weeks ago'? | Hacker News Reader

When was '2 weeks ago' and did it come before or after '2 weeks ago'?

73 pointsqwery46 comments

Why are timestamps increasingly being replaced by vaguely worded junk?

This has been happening for a long time, but today Github told me that when filtering issues based on creation time, "Date formatting must follow the ISO8601 standard". This is the hill they die on, I guess... Except, the reason I was looking up the syntax for this in the first place was because the creation times are displayed in such a useless manner.

I don't know, it just seems like for anything older than a day it's easier to think about when things happened, not how long ago something happened. And then the resolution degrades to useless levels for anything older than 'today' anyway.

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Oh my god, fuck these things so much.

Most of them, mercifully, will show the whole date if moused-over. But that's still an awful user experience for exactly the case you describe.

I can see a use-case for both, so why not simply show both?

Sometimes if you mouseover the vague time stamp you’ll get an ISO time stamp pop up. Doesn’t help if you’re on your phone, of course.

I gotta say though, personally I can never remember what day of the month it is, so having it say “X days ago” is a big help to me.

Is there anytime where you would be seeing a comment's timestamp on a device where the actual date isn't visible also or a single swipe away?

I rarely remember the date offhand but whenever I need to care I have two devices on my body and another four or five devices within feet of me with the date down the second.

No. But it’s easier not to have to.

When I do need an exact time stamp, it’s easy enough to mouseover.

It also doesn't help if you're looking at a screen shot.

I was about halfway down a page literally filled with '2 weeks ago' issues, mousing over each one when I went and looked up the search syntax. Fun fact, I also found I couldn't select the whole info line (#issue date author) properly, no doubt due to some shenanigans with implementing the timestamp obfuscation system.

In cases where I want to compare today/now with some event time, using a relative format makes a lot of sense.

Relative timestamps really are more user-friendly than ISO 8601 for 90% of the use-cases of 90% of users. I share your sentiments about them but objectively speaking we are in the minority, even for ostensibly technical-focused sites like GitHub.

I'm much happier with relative timestamps-- as long as I can hover over and get a real timestamp (preferably '8601) I'm good. 70%+ of the time-- and 100% of the time when I'm most in a rush-- I just want an order-of-magnitude relative time: is this seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, or years?

If I'm going to be looking at a timestamp, I'm going to be thinking. Often times what I'll be comparing to is-- (or might be, because of ambiguity)-- a local time. Hovering my mouse is not a dealbreaker.

I’ll admit, “Last commit X days ago” is super useful for quickly evaluating GitHub repos.

But you trade being slightly more useful, in exchange for creating real problems for the people who need to know the real time.

At least let people mouse over, or click on the time, and get a real timestamp.

Some of these tools seem to be copying from designs intended for social media websites, instead of something work related.

"Two weeks ago" and "ISO 8601" are not the only options. I prefer a user-readable date-time like "June 26, 9:35am" or "Yesterday at 2:12pm". They are best much more precise than "Yesterday" or "1 hour ago".

"1 hour ago"

As an Australian this is actually a lot better for me.

If there's a time like "10:43am" I have no idea whether that's UTC , my timezone, or some American timezone.

You could argue that they should put the timezone there, but they don't, or they will but only for American TZ.

and I don't want to dig around my profile settings to find it.

Even hacker News is relative. I know that I am responding 34 minutes after your post.

I assume if you're displaying a time to me with no timezone specified then my system timezone is being used. If I find a system that's displaying a timezone-less time that's not my system time zone I won't be using that system much longer. But nowadays this is exceedingly rare.

I am in New Zealand so I understand your perspective, I just don't think it's a major problem.

> Relative timestamps really are more user-friendly than ISO 8601 for 90% of the use-cases of 90% of users.

Do you have data to back that up?

I assume that that is a factor (although I'm not sure about the significance), and I'm more or less tolerant of these things depending on context. That Github was the particular instance that motivated the post was not a coincidence.

I'm not calling for ISO 8601 by force (not seriously anyway) and it's not just relative vs. absolute. Relative timestamps must be a better choice for some use cases. But the horrors I'm describing are not just relative timestamps, they're non-linearly quantised (probably not a strictly correct term), obfuscated, and relative.

You just dropped a random number that is not backed by any research, no?

Because most people I know, even en especially older persons, if you say 2 weeks ago, they will look at their calendar and count days to see what day it was exactly.

Let's suppose I tell you: you will have a free concert in 3 weeks. First you will want to know the exact day, then you will still want the correct date because otherwise you don't know if it is in may or in June, Beginning or end of the month,...

Not backed by research, but the number isn’t random. I based it on the time I was building a site for a company. There was a discussion about relative vs absolute timestamps, so for about a week I was asking people (friends, family, friends’ families, cab drivers, baristas, etc) which they found more useful. I’ll see if I can find the notebook where I tallied up the results because as I recall it was indeed very close to 90%.

I think the sweet spot should be showing the actual date/time if > 24 hours. For rest, you could do "6 hours ago" or "15 mins ago". Then show a tooltip on the "6 hours ago" to show actual date/timestamp. THis is a better user experience in my opinion.

Why? How is "6 minutes ago" more useful than "9:27am today" or "2023-06-26 09:23"? For one thing it becomes out of date and inaccurate within 1 minute of the page loading. Do I have to memorise the loading time of each of my tabs so I know how to put timestamps into context?

It can be useful when frequently working across many timezones, working on remote systems etc.

While I generally prefer absolute timestamps, sometimes "1 hour ago" or lets meet in "30 mins" is easier and skips the mental gymnastics of coverting timezones.

9:27 assumes i

a) have any clue what time it is now b) assumes that an arbitrary time designation is more important to me than the relative distance.

When talking about stuff today, as a general statement "a" is almost always false for me and "b" is false nearly 100% of the time.

I don't care that it was at 9:27am I care how long ago it was. "Was this the thing i just attempted or the prior attempt?" "did this happen before or after that conversation we had like 20 minutes ago?"

"a" means i have to do an additional lookup. It doesn't matter that it's easy, it's an additional lookup. "b" means that i also have to do math, and i have a really really hard time with mental math (dyscalculia is a real thing).

and, as others have pointed out. Time zones suck. I'm constantly coming up against UIs that refuse to tell me the time in my time zone when i need it, or in "their" time zone when I need it.

"is that actually their 9:27 am, and thus my 2:27pm or is it _my_ 9:27am?" is the type of question I'm constantly asking. And then it's followed by "oh but [person x] is in a time zone one hour off so really that would be ...8:27 or 1:27?"

I generally find the difference between "1 week ago", "1 month ago", and "1 year ago" (and "10 years ago", for that matter) way more useful than "3 hours ago" versus "5 hours ago". I'd rather see precise times for the current day than precise dates for the past.

This post is from "1 hour ago" as I write this comment...

I've noticed on Instagram, if someone's been offline for 1 hour 59 minutes, it says "Last seen 1 hour ago", which for my definition is not 1 hour ago.

For 2 weeks that's a lot of range (14 to 20 days), it seems like it would make sense to say "2 weeks ago" for e.g. 14-16 days, 17/18/19 days ago, and "almost 3 weeks ago" on day 20...

For real, this is the bane of my existence. There's probably some engagement metric that is being addressed by this, but to me it looks like programmer incompetence. 1 year 11 months ago getting rounded down to 1 year ago is not useful.

I think it's an example of cargo cult design, where you go with relative times because everyone else is doing it, and you don't really think about usability.

Totally agree that once it's past "X days ago", it's utter garbage. It's so stupid to scroll through Twitch vods and see a dozen videos that are "last month".

That's a shallow dismissal. Maybe everyone else is doing it because people love it. Same with large SUVs, non-removable batteries and thin laptops.

They gave a concrete example where where it is bad.

Or, maybe people think they love this stuff, because the manufacturers told them to? The large SUV example being on your list was pretty telling...

https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-loophole-that-made-cars-in...

Mots SUVs sold are compacts and crossovers, not truck based monsters

My wildass guess:

At the scale of GitHub, it probably makes business sense to bucket sort time stamps instead of performing a lookup for every record for every file.

Eliminating all the potential latency due to cache invalidation probably improves user experience as well. I mean if a user experienced four minutes to retrieve dates because of network issues it would be bad even if it only happened to them only once every few months.

Also, the primary use case for git is to use the latest files and whether the latest file was from 205.6811 hours ago or 305.1342 hours ago is not a statistically meaningful use case for a tool like a webpage representing a git repository.

I mean sure it matters in edge cases for git, but a user can always look at their local repository.

My apologies to anyone who feels I am not adequately outraged, offended, or angered by vague dates. GitHub is amazing and better than any practical engineering alternative operating at a similar scale.

YMMV, good luck.

No need to do it in the backend and worry about caching. Just output iso-dates and have them converted in the frontend.

“worry about caching”

At scale, caching is typically a principle engineering concern.

> Why are timestamps increasingly being replaced by vaguely worded junk?

I don't know but it's clearly part of the general trend for everything to get worse. Fortunately, many of the web sites that show the time as vaguely worded junk will also show a more precise indication if you mouse-over. So I think the end of the world is still a few years off.

OT: Not to mention inability to reference / access any older pages in infinite scroll - old web long gone (a long time ago).

> end of the world is still a few years off.

I don't get a timestamp with mouse-over.

I don't want to complain about being thrown the occasional bone, but the fact that they allow you to view the actual absolute timestamp is also kind of infuriating -- I mean it's right there. I know you have it!

`End of the world: more than a year away`

>> Why are timestamps increasingly being replaced by vaguely worded junk?

It seems like an attempt to be more user relateable, but as you point out, it is less precise than an ISO 8601-formatted timestamp.

Ideally there should be an option to just use timestamps instead of 'vague relative time'.

I wrote my first routine to display relative times for web applications around 2001.

A lot of times I just want to know it was "3 days ago" and the cognitive load of doing date arithmetic in my head is a lot, and I frequently do it wrong.

But there's no reason you can't just show both.

Ever since I noticed that Reddit or some other crappy site considered 1 year plus 364 days to be "1 year ago" its been a lot of extra cognitive load for me to see these things and not know if I can trust them to be meaningful.

I agree. I think the rare frustration when you want the timestamp greatly outweighs the much more frequent but ever so slight cognitive convenience from the “X time ago” format.

I assumed this stuff leaked out of Social Media look and feel where the vaguest indication of date is sufficient, I loath it.

FWIW my default would be "sort of 8601" (2023-06-26 15:03) and there could be a settings option for other styles, including "Opaque Dates ?" to provide the "seven months ago" style.

the problem where this gets in the way for me is that i can't tell if a browser tab i opened is current or if it is already old.

hacker news is an example of that. it tells me that this post was submitted 5 hours ago. and if i leave the tab open and look at it tomorrow, it will still say it was 5 hours ago. if it would instead show the actual time, i'd know without reloading that this is already a day old.

I generally like this for quick reference. However I demand that a hover will reveal the actual time stamp.

no. it did not come before or after. it came at excactly '2 weeks ago', which is neither before nor after.

Ask HN:

It's quite simple, it's another thing what the self-proclaimed Internet beauty connosiers (shitheads with an inflated ego but sadly with a working Notepad.exe) decided to be 'ugly' and started a holy crusade to eliminate it.

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