A special place in hell is reserved for Stack Overflow’s recent redesign, which shows “Over a year ago” both for comments that are 13 months old and for those that are 13 years old.

> 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.

The way that this is handled on most websites is that you show "X time ago" but you can hover over the time to get the full timestamp. For example, that's how it's handled here on Hacker News and Reddit.

Which is great UX on a phone.

Honestly, the fact that mobile browsers don't provide a way to see the contents of the title attribute is a severe UX failing on the part of the browser developers, not the website developers, who are literally using the attribute as intended.

The relative-time labeling bit HN in the ass this week during its outage (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46301921>), when hours-old comments were displayed as "n minutes ago", with n ranging from 0 to low-single-digits.

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.)

I honestly don't understand why it's ever useful to die show relative timestamps over absolute ones. It's not hard to look at a date or time and understand how far back it was; it's not even that I can do the math to figure out the relative time, but that the relative version isn't even worth bothering to calculate because the absolute one is just as intuitive. If it's currently February 20XX and I see a timestamp of July 20XX-1, I know how long it's been since then, and I don't care about the number of months. If it's February and I see the timestamp "7 months ago" I don't immediately know it's July without at least doing some small amount of thinking, like "okay, a year before five months from now, so July" (which is especially silly because now I'm having to lean even more into relative times just to be able to get back to the absolute date). Seeing the exact date and also potentially know other pertinent facts like the season ("that picture was from the summer"), holidays ("it must be from the 4th of July barbecue"), etc.

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.

> Is there something I'm missing here about why people might prefer relative timestamps?

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).

To clarify, I don't mean to literally imply an exact timestamp format. Showing something like "December 19, 2025 4:28 PM" or "19 December 2025 16:28" seems strictly better to me than "31 seconds ago" because it doesn't either become inaccurate quickly or require having the page update in real-time.

Posts for one thing like yours an hour ago as of this post. Sometimes people want to see how old content is at a glance. Like how long ago did someone log in?

I guess I just don't find the relative timestamp to be a more intuitive way of seeing that. If I see today's date and a time this morning, I don't need to "translate" that into an exact number of hours because "12 hours ago" isn't more meaningful to me than "this morning", an "2 minutes ago" is likely going to be wrong quickly (or require a technical measure to keep accurate, and given that the relative timestamp already arguably is more work to implement, that's now two extra things added to try to solve a problem that I don't really understand to exist in the first place).

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.