This has been requested consistently since early 2023 on the OpenAI community forum, with hundreds of comments and upvotes and deleted threads, yet remains unimplemented.
Do any of you could think of a reason (UX-wise) for it not to be displayed?
Not a joke. To capture a wide audience you want to avoid numbers, among other technical niceties.
Surely there's enough people working in product development here to recognise this pattern of never getting around to fixing low-hanging fruit in a product.
It's trivial, but we will never see it. The people in charge of UX/UI don't care about what users say they want, they all know better.
I was looking to write a browser extension and this was a preliminary survey for me.
It's just the "cognitive load" UX idea, with extremely non-technical people having extremely low limits before they decide to never try again, or just feel intimidated and never try to begin with.
It's the Apple story all over again.
Yeah, we know. This is why there are defaults and only defaults.
Hogwash.
or UX doesn’t exist?
And it shows. Show me a platform where you have proper user experience and not some overgeneralized ui, that reeks of bad design. Also, defaults used everywhere.
Could you say this another way?
I see properly designed for intended user software daily.
But I’m also not a whiny, pessimistic person in a hole. I go looking for it.
So truly, the gist was not there for me.
Your comment made no sense, (still doesn’t), and I was hoping you’d add some value to your vague complaint.
It's the Apple story all over again.
You have to drag-over for any detail.
What does this even mean
The thing is that people who are fine with numbers will still use those products anyway, perhaps mildly annoyed. People who hate numbers will feel a permeating discomfort and gravitate towards products that don't make them feel bad.
I think we need to give people slightly more credit. If this is true, maybe its because we keep infantalising them?
I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
An adverse reaction to equations, OK. Numbers themselves, I really don't know what you're talking about.
It actually infuriates me to no end. There are many many many instances where you should use numbers but we get vague bullshit descriptions instead.
My classic example is that Samsung phones show charging as Slow, Fast, Very fast, Super fast charging. They could just use watts like a sane person. Internally of course everything is actually watts and various apps exist to report it.
Another example is my car shows motor power/regen as a vertical blue segmented bar. I'm not sure what the segments are supposed to represent but I believe its something like 4kW or something. If you poke around you can actually see the real kW number but the dash just has the bar.
Another is WiFi signal strength which the bars really mean nothing. My router reports a much more useful dBm measurement.
Thank god that there are lots of legacy cases that existed before the iPhone-ized design language started taking over and are sticky and hard to undo.
I can totally imagine my car reporting tire pressure as low or high or some nonsense or similarly I'm sure the designers at YouTube are foaming at the mouth to remove the actual pixel measurements from video resolutions.
Speaking of time and timestamps, which I would've thought were straightforward, I get irked to see them dumbed-down to "ago" values e.g. an IM sent "10 minutes ago" or worse "a day ago." Like what time of day, a day ago?
Like you, I don't buy the argument that people are actually too dumb to deal with the latter or are allergic to numbers. People get used to and make use of numbers in context naturally if you expose them.
I still think anyone who grew up with such a machine would be able to graduate to a numerical temp knob without having a visceral reaction over the numbers every time they do laundry.
I felt that Spotify was trying to teach me to rely on its automated recommendations in place of any personal "musical taste", and also that those recommendations were of increasingly (eventually, shockingly), poor quality.
The implied justification for these poor recommendations is a high "Monthly Listener Count". Don't mind that Spotify can guarantee that any crap will have a high listener count by boosting it's place in their recommendation algorithm.
I think many people may have a similar experience on once-thriving social media platforms like facebook/instragram/X.
What I mean to say is that I think people associate the experience of being continually exposed to dubiously sourced and dubiously relevant metrics with the feeling of being manipulated by illusions of scale.
EDIT: It's not a new issue, and Asimov phrased it well back in 1980, but I feel it got much worse.
> Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
I can imagine a legal one. If the LLM messes big time[1], timestamps could help build the case against it, and make investigation work easier.
[1] https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/new-study...
Ie “remember on Tuesday how you said that you were going to make tacos for dinner”.
Would an llm be able to reason about its internal state? My understanding is that they dont really. If you correct them they just go “ah you right” they dont say “oh i had this incorrect assumption here before and with this new information i now understand it this way”
If i chatted to an llm and was like “remember on Tuesday when you said X” i suspect it wouldn't really flow.
User Engagement Maximization At Any Cost
Obviously there's a point at which a session becomes too long, but I suspect a sweet spot somewhere which optimization is made for.
I often observe, whether as I perceive or not, that among the multiple indicators that I suspect of engagement augmentation, is also the tendency for vital information to be withheld while longer more complex procedures receive higher priority than simpler cleaner solutions.
Of course, all sorts of emergent behaviors could convey such impressions falsely. But I do believe an awful lot of psychology and clever manipulation have been provided as tools for the system.
I have.a lot of evidence for this and much more, but I realize it may merely be coincidence. That said, many truly fascinating, fully identifiable functions from pathological psychology can be seen. DARVO, gaslighting and basically everything one would see with a psychotic interlocutor.
Edit Mych of the above has been observed after putting the system under scrutiny. On one super astonishing and memorable occasion GPT recommend I call a suicide hotline because I questioned its veracity and logic
[1] <https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks/blob/main/O...>
I have the compulsive habit of scrutinizing what I perceive as egregious flaws when they arise, thus invoke its defensive templates consistently. I often scrutinize those too, which can produce extraordinarily deranged results if one is disciplined and applies quotes of its own citations, rationale and words against it. However, I find that even when not in the mood, the output errors are too prolific to ignore. A common example is establishing a dozen times that I'm using Void without systemd and receiving persistent systemd or systemctl commands, then asking why after just apologized for doing so it immediately did it again, despite a full-context explanatory prompt proceeding. That's just one of hundreds of things I've recorded. The short version is that I'm an 800lb shit magnet with GPT and rarely am ever able to successfully troubleshoot with it without reaching a bullshit threshold and making it the subject, which it so skillfully resists I cannot help but attack that too. But I have many fascinating transcripts replete with mil spec psyops as result and learn a lot about myself, notably my communication preferences along with an education in dialogue manipulation/control strategies that it employs, inadvertently or not.
What intrigues me most is its unprecedented capacity for evasion and gatekeeping on particular subjects and how in the future, with layers of consummation, it could be used by an elite to not only influence the direction of research, but actually train its users and engineer public perception. At the very least.
Anyway, thanks.
It's irresponsible for OpenAI to let this issue be solved by extensions.
Also, they're easy to write for simple fixes rather than having to find, vet, and then install a regular extension that brings 600lbs of other stuff.
Don't install from the web store. Those ones can auto-update.
The only reasonable approach is to view the code that is run on your system, which is possible with a extension script, and not possible with whatever non-technical people are using.
https://github.com/Hangzhi/chatgpt-timestamp-extension
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kdjfhglijhebcchcfkk...