Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Relative timestamps
Raised as a usability problem by 11 people on Hacker News over 14 years (2011–2024), in 8 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
Every issue, all time, most people first
Relative times like 'N days ago' hide the actual dateUnreviewed
20112026- Relative times like '1 day and 5 hours ago' hide exact date, needing hover to see it2024-08-24
- Relative time labels hide the actual day or date of events in logs2024-08-21
- Original exact date is hidden, so users cannot pin down when something happened2023-11-01
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 11 complaints
- Relative times like '1 day and 5 hours ago' hide exact date, needing hover to see it2024-08-24
- Relative time labels hide the actual day or date of events in logs2024-08-21
- Original exact date is hidden, so users cannot pin down when something happened2023-11-01
- Vague relative dates like "3 months ago" make it hard to know the actual date2023-10-14
- Exact date is hidden behind a hover tooltip, and tooltips can't be copied2023-10-14
- Relative dates like "last week" are ambiguous, so users must learn the library's rules to interpret them2023-10-14
- Shows vague relative times like '2 weeks ago' while hiding the exact timestamp2023-06-25
- Relative dates like '2 weeks ago' make it impossible to tell when something happened2023-06-25
- Relative times like "N days ago" hide the actual date and time of an event2020-10-12
- Relative dates like 'yesterday' make events hard to order across sites2015-07-03
- Relative times like "14 hours ago" hide the actual time of day, forcing mental arithmetic2011-07-04