Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2025 August 7

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August 7

Why do websites such as Reddit or LinkedIn display the approximate age (e.g. "two months ago") of a post instead of its exact date and time?

Thanks. Apokrif (talk) 01:12, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

You'd be better off asking there, but I would suspect they see it as an unnecessary waste of resources to constantly update all the dates and times. Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:28, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

I don't see how the resources would be conserved by doing that; the easy thing would be to just leave the timestamp and let users do the math if they want to. No math to do at all. Next easiest would be to do it precisely: ("Comment is 4 days, 17 hours old"). Hardest would be what they're doing, which is taking the math and then converting it to something conversational ("About two months ago"). As a user, I like what they're doing: it gives you an immediate sense of whether the conversation is stale or not and you can find the exact timestamp if that's important to you. Matt Deres (talk) 14:01, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

you can find the exact timestamp: how? Apokrif (talk) 15:41, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Generally, hovering your pointer over the "one day ago" (or whatever). Reddit gives the timestamp down to the second. Not sure about LinkedIn; I don't use it much. They might not do it. Matt Deres (talk) 17:20, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Is the info available on mobile? Apokrif (talk) 23:15, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

@Apokrif Generally, because a relative date is easier information for a user to consume/mentally process, than the exact dates and times. The exact dates and times require more mental calculations to process and often have a level of detail that is too high for most use cases. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 14:26, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

I agree, that's surely what they would say. E.g. looking at Reddit, you can find the timestamp in the HTML as e.g.

⟨time datetime="2020-04-02T12:17:17.182Z" title="Thursday, April 2, 2020 at 12:17:17 PM UTC" class="text-neutral-content-weak text-12"⟩5y ago⟨/time⟩

This "service" is something that became common some time ago (15 years?). Unnecessarily taking away potentially important information from the first glance, not helping in any way, if you ask me.

Icek~enwiki (talk) 17:18, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

So why does Mediawiki software (as used for Wikimedia projects) do otherwise? 😉 Apokrif (talk) 23:16, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

@Apokrif Mediawiki does still do proper UX research with their own users and the development process is more open. If you hover over the timestamp next to your message, you can see they still felt the need to put the relative time somewhere, but it was more practical (probably to make archiving easier too) to put the absolute timestamp at the very front. Komonzia (talk) 17:47, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

They do that specifically for me. When I look at pages like those, usually referred there througn some googling results, I'm interested how old some information is - and it's much much easier to comprehend and compare smething like '2 weeks' vs. '1 yr old' than 'March 17, 2024' vs. 'May 12, 2013'. Just because the most significant difference can be one of the least visible (a single digit at the end may mean more than a word and a number spanning the half of the date). --CiaPan (talk) 18:05, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

My complaint would be that it stays "1 week ago" for 1 week, with an error up to 100% it does not seem to be so useful. It could be like "2025-07-31 02:15Z" or at least "1.1 weeks ago" for a little bit more information. Icek~enwiki (talk) 19:24, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

It also loses accuracy over time, progressing from a resolution of minutes to hours to days to months to "about 1 year ago". Imagine future research of, say, people's attitudes during the covid pandemic. When exactly were these posts written? Oh, about 1 decade ago. Thanks for the information.  Card Zero  (talk) 00:48, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Agree to all that, but both of you are viewing this from the wrong lens. It's about letting people know how active or stale a thread or conversation is. On August 8, 2025, a post from August 7, 2023 might initially appear to still be active because people are generally inattentive. But saying it's from "two years ago" is easy to read and unambiguous. The difference between a week old thread and a two-week old thread is not material to that purpose. (Also, I'm sure different sites use different methods and they've certainly changed over time, but Reddit seems to use days until a post is a month old. At least currently. I only did a cursory glance, but found no "week" nomenclature.) Matt Deres (talk) 12:34, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

There was a recent UK story about an itinerant murderer who left numerous reviews of scenic locations on Google maps. One of these was close to the site where he did the murder, but the interesting matter of whether it was written on the same day is unknown, since the date was stated in terms of "about N months ago".  Card Zero  (talk) 00:42, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Google did not provide more info? Apokrif (talk) 02:23, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Perhaps to the cops, but it didn't reach the news sites. Besides this is more of a curiosity than something that could be used in evidence, since from what I saw his reviews just discussed painters and nature reserves and fishing spots, and used the word "tranquil" a lot.  Card Zero  (talk) 03:52, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

I've wondered about this, too. It's not just Reddit and LinkedIn, it's virtually all modern software. It's quite annoying. I regularly find myself knowing the exact date of something I'm looking for in a long list, but if it's less than a week old, first I have to do math to determine that it's, say, 3 days ago.

I honestly don't know if this is a meaningless fashion trend that all modern programmers copy each other on, or if they actually think people will find it useful, or if some majority of users actually do find it useful. I certainly don't, but I appear to be in some kind of minority. —scs (talk) 15:22, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

Decisions like this aren't usually the programmers' unless the programmer is also a UX designer. Those decisions are based on (sometimes shoddy, assumption-laden) research, or, sometimes the idea spreads to other software (because the UX designer thinks it's a good idea or 'the done thing') without researching about whether that website's particular audience prefers one option or the other (in this case, precise versus relative timestamps). In cases where the programmer still had their wits about them and knew better, you can hover over a relative time to see the exact time (I prefer to see both). Komonzia (talk) 17:17, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

It's possible that most people do prefer natural language relative times to precise absolute timestamps. But then, most people prefer TikTok to Reddit, so it's not clear why UX should conform to what most people like, as opposed to being good.  Card Zero  (talk) 12:18, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

One reason is to not have to worry about timezones. If it says "posted at 12:21," is that at my local time, your local time, the server's local time, or some other time zone? If it says it was posted three hours ago, that's the same wherever you are in the world. Chuntuk (talk) 14:25, 14 August 2025 (UTC)

On Reddit, if you hover over the approximate age, you'll get the exact date and time, at least on the default "New Reddit" theme. -insert valid name here- (talk) 19:18, 15 August 2025 (UTC)

Usually you can inspect element and the full ISO date will be in the code AFAIK. —Matrix _{ping me}^{when u reply} (t? - c) 14:11, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

On a related note, Wikipedia actually has this feature seen on other websites via Wikipedia:Comments in Local Time. Its because although there's the option to change time zones in page histories in the settings, it doesn't affect signatures since that's coded in. For me it would say something along the lines of "7:55 pm, Today (UTC+1)" JuniperChill (talk) 18:55, 19 August 2025 (UTC)