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Ask HN: Am I the only one that hates the dark patters with dates?

8 points by Racing0461 ↗ HN
Youtube comments/community posts etc now only does X days ago and usually when you went to inspect the element the real date would be an attribute but nowadays its just the actual text and nothing else. Feels like another dark pattern. Ubereats and Doordash avoids showing you the actual times you ordered and when it was delivered to avoid you calculating the time in your head to realizing it took 1 hour and 5 mins instead of what the timer said and kept updating to.

I'm starting to notice this alot now and not sure if this is just hanlon's razor or actual malice (im going with the latter).

5 comments

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88913527
I think the quality of the median engineer is declining. The finer details like putting the full timestamp in an HTML attribute are lost on these new people. I also think they skipped learning fundamentals and jump into React and didn't take the time to learn real DOM, so vDOM -> DOM conversion poses even more barriers for them.
version_five
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. But, at least in the Uber Eats case mentioned it's definitely malice.
thfuran
Very little software is developed with actual malice, but a monomaniacal pursuit of profit without regard for the costs it imposes on others is another matter entirely.
catchnear4321
it was likely more than one team that got that “4 days ago” in front of you. an absurd game of telephone.

at some point a timestamp is converted. a backend likely changed. the new backend had a different timestamp format, something like that. it was different.

different is bad. it needed to go back to looking like the rest. it needed to be “4 days ago.”

from the back of the zoom call, a lone voice said “hang on, sharing my screen, it can be done in a few minutes…”

it was a backend engineer.

no one said stop. (narrator: someone should have said stop.)

so, now, instead of anything close to an iso timestamp, you get an approximate relative date.

there might even be a ticket to fix it. but it isn’t broken. so it isn’t priority, and it never will be…

bediger4000
GitHub does that with dates on tags/releases and I hate it. Just show me the dad burn date.