Why is it that on social platforms, the date stamps are obscured? It there some sort of security or other technical reason for this? Is it user oriented somehow that I am failing to consider?
I want to see, select and copy the dates associated with posts. Ideally everywhere on the web. Bypass? Can ublock origin do anything about this?
On dbz for example, you get a relative time only unless you hover to see the specific time:
Piefed and reddit both do this.
Additionally, the text that displays the relative time is often not normal and cannot be selected and copied. “Select all” skips it:
Here’s how dates look in the source. lemmy.dbzer0.com:
<span class="moment-time pointer unselectable" data-tippy-content="Sunday, August 31st, 2025 at 3:58:32 AM GMT+00:00">6 hours ago</span>
I see there is class unselectable. I don’t know what exactly is going on.
On PieFed you can select/copy the relative time stamp, like “2 years ago”, but still not the actual date.
Mastodon displays recent posts with a relative time like “12h” but at some point things get old enough to graduate to just the date: “Dec 9, 2023”. And you can select the text as normal.
edit: title “why do web developers want to make it hard to see/copy the date of posts and comments?”
I can’t explain the unselectable property, but displaying relative time is considered good UX.
I kind of despise relative time. You see a bunch of stuff that says “yesterday” but can’t tell exactly when without taking more actions. Just tell me the date time I’m not a child.
Fuckin seriously. No shit it was yesterday, but WHEN? I got like 200 messages “yesterday”, and they didn’t all come in at once.
I like it, as long as the absolute date is still visible when you hover over.
At work I had a page with 50 “friendly” dates and I had to figure out with ones were wrong. They all said like “yesterday”. Hell. Could have hovered over each one and taken notes, I guess, but that would suck. Had to use the dev tools and do a lot more thinking than just looking at them.
Ideally you’d have a better place to work with that data than a UI that is displaying relative dates. Internal reporting data you can query for instance
Maybe, but the bug report was it was showing them in the “wrong order” in the UI. I could look at the API response but then I need to map that to what’s displayed somehow. I think I used the dev tools to run js on the page to get the actual dates in one go (since that was in the dom), but that kind of sucks. A customer certainly isn’t going to do that. They see a bunch of stuff that all says “yesterday” or “two weeks ago” and they need to do extra work to get information that we went out of our way to hide.
I can see why the average user might prefer relative timestamps but I for one would prefer absolute timestamps. It would be nice to get a toggle—wouldn’t exactly be much work to implement and maintain.
I hate it. If I interact with a system in anything more than a very sporadic way, I end up with multiple objects on screen that all say “created just now” which is completely unhelpful.
Luckily most systems can re-enable actual time again (even if it is buried in a settings menu) so I can see what’s actually happening.