I always get frustrated when I see a 7 months ago, or X years ago, the math is always inconsistent when they round it. So when something is more than 3 days old, I display the actual date.
What especially makes me angry is dev tools doing this.
No, Github, Circle CI or Google Console [1] and others. I need to see actual timestamps on commits, PRs, merges, logs etc. not the bullshit "7hrs ago" when I'm trying to find out what broke.
[1] At one point a few years back their log viewer would show this. Someone actually implemented it because showing this is more work than actual proper timestamps.
This made identifying the duration of the outage somewhat more difficult.
(HN does display the precise time in a title text for the timestamp which typically appears on hover, though you'd need to know that that's in UTC.)
Is there something I'm missing here about why people might prefer relative timestamps? I genuinely can't tell if everyone kind of universally hates them or if this is one of those things where my brain just works differently than a lot of other people.
Having thought through a bunch of different orders of magnitude of time (time in the past measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and years), I'm confident that I'd personally find the actual date and time to be more intuitive in every single one of them. What I'm not confident in is whether that would be the case for everyone else or not. I don't think there would be anything wrong with someone feeling differently than me, and if it turns out I'm in the minority, I wouldn't have any trouble accepting it, but it feels so fundamentally disconnected with the way I think about things that I have trouble conceiving of it other than as a hypothetical.
I think most people are uncomfortable parsing timestamps for small-interval differences, e.g. `2025-12-19T16:28:09+00:00` for "31 seconds ago".
For larger intervals, I agree that timestamps are more useful. "1 day ago" is a particular bugbear of mine. One day meaning, 13 hours, or meaning 35 hours? Sometimes that's important!
The original advice when relative timestamps became a thing was to choose based on the activity level of the content. If new content is constantly appearing and older stuff fades out of relevance quickly, then choose relative timestamps. Otherwise, use absolute timestamps.
The worst is inconsistency, and the best is sometimes both (when presented in a discoverable and convenient way -- hover text used to be that way, but this degrades on mobile).