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Comment by brassattax | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic but I love that the timestamp on that says "1 decade ago"

Ugh, I haaaaaaaaaate this habit of masking real timestamps and making them progressively worse.

It _completely_ changes the meaning, if someone asked a question about airplanes on September 10th, 2001 or one day later. Just saying "two decades ago" with no way to reveal the original timestamp removes that context.

It's just one of a whole lot of ways the modern web goes out of its way to get in my way.

They at least put the real time and date the question was posted in the headers.

Many sites also put it in the title text (tooltip, i.e., hover / long press). When that fails, I often find it by inspecting the element and looking at every attribute of the elements within 1 level on the tree. Horrible experience.

Revealing it on hover would be the desktop UI answer and perfectly achievable on the web if they wanted to. Facebook does this on post times. I think it's a decent tradeoff.

Unfortunately mobile doesn't always work nicely with hover semantics.

I now remember a bunch of text clocks years ago...

"It's about half past two."

"It's a little before quarter to three."

I would prefer Yahoo Answers to have fuzzy timestamps. On a site where the information is somewhat reliable it would be really annoying, but on Yahoo Answers when you see "decade" you know its not even worth opening the lid to smell it. Just chuck it.

The point of Yahoo Answers isn't to find useful information. It's to find hysterically dumb questions and even worse answers

With recent content, I prefer to know how many hours/days ago it was posted. I find that exponentially more helpful than guessing timezones and things like that.

However, you're completely right when it comes to timestamps exceeding a certain age. That's why in my own projects I use a mixed approach: display recently changed things in relative time and all others in absolute terms.

I also advocate to display more detailed information when the user mouses over a timestamp, just so the data is there if needed - as it is in this case.

Slack does this too and it’s pretty annoying if I’m trying to figure out the exact time someone messaged me.

It would even take less space:

4 hours ago

04:12AM

Hah, yes. It sort of assumes the page will be around for more than 1 decade, doesn't it?

hm how so? I just assumed they're using something like moment for relative time https://momentjs.com/docs/#/displaying/fromnow/

If not, you lose resolution for no reason.

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