[Xenoamorphous]

Off topic but I really dislike the trend of using “human readable durations” like “a month ago”, just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself.

Outlook (Mac version at least) is the worst offender. For emails prior to the current day it will say for example just “yesterday” and it will only show you the time if you click on the email. I get dozens of mails per day, having just “yesterday” for 50 messages in a row is useless.

[sanderjd]

I like it iff I can hover over the human readable version to get the actual timestamp.

[nuccy]

Better the opposite - date by default and on hover human readable. People would more likely want to copy the actual date than the human readable delta.

[sanderjd]

Agree to disagree :) The "human readable" is better at a glance, and timestamps are better when I care about the specifics.

> People would more likely want to copy the actual date than the human readable delta.

I agree that this is true when copying, but text is primarily for reading, not copying.

[stemlord]

I find dates more readable as an ordered list of numbers. A thread can be quickly scrolled down through while seeing >2001 then eventually >2024 at the same x-position on the page. Same goes with the month then day.

Anyway, in the context of a comment/activity thread, how long ago from today that an entry was tends to be less important than the age of the comment relative to the other comments.

[afiori]

If all the comments are 1 year ago then it is not very informative on the relative order

[saurik]

> I get dozens of mails per day, having just “yesterday” for 50 messages in a row is useless.

How is this "better at a glance"?!

[sanderjd]

Like I said, agree to disagree, diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks and all that, but to me, after a day, the most pertinent at-a-glance information there is "this was received yesterday". I definitely think it's more useful for more recent things that can say "37 minutes ago" or "3 hours ago", but to me, "yesterday" is also useful. (I might prefer it if it said "yesterday morning" and "yesterday evening" or something like that, but I rarely care about the exact time, after a day.)

[apitman]

This can have problems on mobile

[sanderjd]

Yes, but I think the solutions work fine; tap, hard press, whatever.

Don't get me wrong, I share the annoyance with interfaces where I have no way to find the actual timestamp. It's better to only have a timestamp than to only have the "human readable" version with no way to get the timestamp. But (in my opinion) the best is to have the human readable version, with a way to get at the timestamp.

[Vegenoid]

I think the problem is that the mechanism to trigger mouse-hover is not clear on a touchscreen - there are several different ways that need to be remembered and tried, as evidenced by your comment.

[qingcharles]

I wonder if a solution on touch is a (?) icon next to the human date? Or is that too much clutter?

[Vegenoid]

I like ? icons that can be either hovered or clicked on to reveal a popup with additional info.

[sanderjd]

Yes, but I think the venn diagram of people who really want to see a timestamp and people who are willing and able try a few different things to find it is pretty close to being a circle.

[freedomben]

Seriously, I cannot wait for this trend to die. It makes a huge difference if an email was received at 6:00 a.m. or if it was received at 11:00 p.m. that day. Simply saying "yesterday" is not good enough!

I like my beer cold and my time stamps precise.

[Zuiii]

Design over function at microsoft.

The new outlook 365 seems to have removed the time component from older entries so even when they show you the date, it won't include the time. If you have 20 emails per day, you'll have to open them one by one until you find the one you need.

I wish there is a way to revert to the old behavior but microsoft support says we don't need this.

[LM358]

Even worse when it's wrong, Discogs insists that October 2021 is "over three years ago"

[Minor49er]

This seems on brand for Discogs and their awful design changes lately. They also replaced fast-loading pages with super slow AJAX requests (reminiscent of the equally disastrous C2 Wiki's similar design update from years ago). Discogs also is now randomly censoring album art until you log in for some reason, but only for the main image on a release page and not in the dozen of other places where the album art appears on a page otherwise </rant>

[sapiogram]

Earlier this years, Github would routinely say "2 years ago" for comments made 11 months ago.

[SECProto]

I've experienced (not on GitHub) things that happened 729 days ago being "one year ago", which is similarly incorrect

[bmicraft]

It's not correct, but at least not unexpectedly so

[jimnotgym]

> just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself.

I, however, really struggle with this. I have a real problem with any concept of dates or the passing of time.

[afiori]

Then show a detailed timestamp in a tooltip.

[latexr]

Hover over the date to see the exact day and time.

[Xenoamorphous]

In Outlook for Mac if I hover "Yesterday" in the tooltip I get... "Yesterday".

[latexr]

I see now it wasn’t clear, but I was referring to bugzilla. I don’t use Outlook.

[jvdvegt]

Hover? I'm on mobile...

[LeoPanthera]

This is kind of an aside, but hover is a perfectly valid UI mechanism, and I intensely dislike the trend of kneecapping the UI just to make it work on a touch screen.

Some things just don't work well if you don't have a mouse. That doesn't mean we should throw them away. It just means that sometimes you need a mouse for real work. There's nothing wrong with that.

[apitman]

I think the point is more that if a feature requires a mouse to work, maybe that mode should be the optional path so it still works on mobile.

[b112]

To each their own, I absolutely despise anything popping up, ever.

Stuff appearing and disappearing as I move my mouse around angers me, and I get even more annoyed when things pop up if I put my mouse somewhere to park it.

A full blown conniption fit happens if I park my mouse, start to read something, and a popup thing gets in the way. The neighbours know when that happens.

[latexr]

At least on bugzilla, I’m able to tap and hold to get the same effect.

[Sakos]

Gitlab shows this relative date. I repeatedly have this issue where I'm trying to look through commits and I have to mouse over every single commit repeatedly while trying to figure out when something was changed in relation to other changes. So I mouse over one, mouse over the next, go back to the previous one, forget what the other one was, mouse over that, then mouse over a fourth and repeat.

Who came up with this insane bullshit?

It'll show me a bunch of commits all made 4 days ago. I have no idea what day that was. Was it Monday? Wednesday? I have logs from the 16th, does Gitlab think that was 4 days ago or 5?

[tomovo]

"Xenoamorphous 4 minutes ago", got it. Edit: 5 minutes ago.

[Xenoamorphous]

Ha! Maybe, maybe for something happening in the past day or so it’s ok, esp. due to timezone conversion confusion.

But for anything older than that, just show me the date!

[afiori]

Personally it is more about avoiding big relative errors: 1 month ago can be between 10 and 45 days ago (maybe, nobody knows how the rounding works). 8 months ago is less of problem

[antonvs]

I think you'll find it was 1 hour and 5 minutes ago.

[Affric]

Holy shit. Human readable.

The actual timestamp/email address/detail is what I need to see to make decisions!

[sayrer]

It helps to avoid timezone details within a day or two. I agree "a month ago" is pretty bad, but I haven't seen that.

But it's good to say "1hr ago" if I send an email from New York to San Francisco.

[gravescale]

If you have your system time wrong somehow, GitLab will happily tell you a bug fix was closed in 4 hours' time.

[perilunar]

> just tell me the bloody date, I can figure out for myself.

But use ISO 8601 or a month name FFS — dd/mm or mm/dd is not always obvious.