When was '2 weeks ago' and did it come before or after '2 weeks ago'?
Why are timestamps increasingly being replaced by vaguely worded junk?
This has been happening for a long time, but today Github told me that when filtering issues based on creation time, "Date formatting must follow the ISO8601 standard". This is the hill they die on, I guess... Except, the reason I was looking up the syntax for this in the first place was because the creation times are displayed in such a useless manner.
I don't know, it just seems like for anything older than a day it's easier to think about when things happened, not how long ago something happened. And then the resolution degrades to useless levels for anything older than 'today' anyway.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 98.3 ms ] threadIt seems like an attempt to be more user relateable, but as you point out, it is less precise than an ISO 8601-formatted timestamp.
Ideally there should be an option to just use timestamps instead of 'vague relative time'.
I don't know but it's clearly part of the general trend for everything to get worse. Fortunately, many of the web sites that show the time as vaguely worded junk will also show a more precise indication if you mouse-over. So I think the end of the world is still a few years off.
> end of the world is still a few years off.
I don't get a timestamp with mouse-over.
`End of the world: more than a year away`
I gotta say though, personally I can never remember what day of the month it is, so having it say “X days ago” is a big help to me.
I rarely remember the date offhand but whenever I need to care I have two devices on my body and another four or five devices within feet of me with the date down the second.
When I do need an exact time stamp, it’s easy enough to mouseover.
In cases where I want to compare today/now with some event time, using a relative format makes a lot of sense.
While I generally prefer absolute timestamps, sometimes "1 hour ago" or lets meet in "30 mins" is easier and skips the mental gymnastics of coverting timezones.
a) have any clue what time it is now b) assumes that an arbitrary time designation is more important to me than the relative distance.
When talking about stuff today, as a general statement "a" is almost always false for me and "b" is false nearly 100% of the time.
I don't care that it was at 9:27am I care how long ago it was. "Was this the thing i just attempted or the prior attempt?" "did this happen before or after that conversation we had like 20 minutes ago?"
"a" means i have to do an additional lookup. It doesn't matter that it's easy, it's an additional lookup. "b" means that i also have to do math, and i have a really really hard time with mental math (dyscalculia is a real thing).
and, as others have pointed out. Time zones suck. I'm constantly coming up against UIs that refuse to tell me the time in my time zone when i need it, or in "their" time zone when I need it.
"is that actually their 9:27 am, and thus my 2:27pm or is it _my_ 9:27am?" is the type of question I'm constantly asking. And then it's followed by "oh but [person x] is in a time zone one hour off so really that would be ...8:27 or 1:27?"
At the scale of GitHub, it probably makes business sense to bucket sort time stamps instead of performing a lookup for every record for every file.
Eliminating all the potential latency due to cache invalidation probably improves user experience as well. I mean if a user experienced four minutes to retrieve dates because of network issues it would be bad even if it only happened to them only once every few months.
Also, the primary use case for git is to use the latest files and whether the latest file was from 205.6811 hours ago or 305.1342 hours ago is not a statistically meaningful use case for a tool like a webpage representing a git repository.
I mean sure it matters in edge cases for git, but a user can always look at their local repository.
My apologies to anyone who feels I am not adequately outraged, offended, or angered by vague dates. GitHub is amazing and better than any practical engineering alternative operating at a similar scale.
YMMV, good luck.
At scale, caching is typically a principle engineering concern.
If I'm going to be looking at a timestamp, I'm going to be thinking. Often times what I'll be comparing to is-- (or might be, because of ambiguity)-- a local time. Hovering my mouse is not a dealbreaker.
At least let people mouse over, or click on the time, and get a real timestamp.
Some of these tools seem to be copying from designs intended for social media websites, instead of something work related.
As an Australian this is actually a lot better for me.
If there's a time like "10:43am" I have no idea whether that's UTC , my timezone, or some American timezone.
You could argue that they should put the timezone there, but they don't, or they will but only for American TZ.
and I don't want to dig around my profile settings to find it.
Even hacker News is relative. I know that I am responding 34 minutes after your post.
I am in New Zealand so I understand your perspective, I just don't think it's a major problem.
Do you have data to back that up?
I'm not calling for ISO 8601 by force (not seriously anyway) and it's not just relative vs. absolute. Relative timestamps must be a better choice for some use cases. But the horrors I'm describing are not just relative timestamps, they're non-linearly quantised (probably not a strictly correct term), obfuscated, and relative.
Because most people I know, even en especially older persons, if you say 2 weeks ago, they will look at their calendar and count days to see what day it was exactly.
Let's suppose I tell you: you will have a free concert in 3 weeks. First you will want to know the exact day, then you will still want the correct date because otherwise you don't know if it is in may or in June, Beginning or end of the month,...
A lot of times I just want to know it was "3 days ago" and the cognitive load of doing date arithmetic in my head is a lot, and I frequently do it wrong.
I've noticed on Instagram, if someone's been offline for 1 hour 59 minutes, it says "Last seen 1 hour ago", which for my definition is not 1 hour ago.
For 2 weeks that's a lot of range (14 to 20 days), it seems like it would make sense to say "2 weeks ago" for e.g. 14-16 days, 17/18/19 days ago, and "almost 3 weeks ago" on day 20...
Totally agree that once it's past "X days ago", it's utter garbage. It's so stupid to scroll through Twitch vods and see a dozen videos that are "last month".
https://www.distilled.earth/p/the-loophole-that-made-cars-in...
Most of them, mercifully, will show the whole date if moused-over. But that's still an awful user experience for exactly the case you describe.
I can see a use-case for both, so why not simply show both?
FWIW my default would be "sort of 8601" (2023-06-26 15:03) and there could be a settings option for other styles, including "Opaque Dates ?" to provide the "seven months ago" style.
hacker news is an example of that. it tells me that this post was submitted 5 hours ago. and if i leave the tab open and look at it tomorrow, it will still say it was 5 hours ago. if it would instead show the actual time, i'd know without reloading that this is already a day old.