freedit    2023-04-05 👍 👎

Good point. I will check this if i got some time.

tsetien    2023-04-09 👍 👎

Relative time is user confusing, not user friendly. Please add it as an option if you must.

Ryza    2023-04-09 👍 👎 [op]

@tsetien #2 If it’s confusing, how do you explain that the vast majority of IT companies use relative time for their projects?

tsetien    2023-04-09 👍 👎

Things cannot be justified simply because of their prevalence. There are many things in the IT industry that are very, very regressive these days, and they all label themself as ‘user-friendly’ or something like that.

Relative time is one of them. How long is ‘seconds ago’, ‘a few moments ago’, or ‘three weeks ago’? If today is 9 April 2023, what is the correct range of ‘three weeks ago’? The exact day of 19 March? Any day between 12 March and 19 March? Or from 19 March to 26 March? 15 March to 22 March? And aren’t all these dates falling in the range of ‘last month’? Then why don’t you just display every timestamp in March ‘last month’ once when it turns 1 April? And how much time will be wasted in calculating these gibberish expressions? I’m not good at maths, and to tell the truth, I have to open a spreadsheet to calculate these dates.

People can easily tell whether a date is in ‘last week’ or ‘next week’, and most people do not need relative expressions longer than that. ‘Two weeks ago’ or ‘three weeks ago’ are very vague, and the definition of these are pretty confusing (let alone people have different conventions on the day a week begin with). And we certainly do not need to be told a date is in ‘last month’ or ‘next month’—there are only twelve months in a calendar, and we can gather that ourselves. Relative dates can only make them way much more confusing, not easening them.

Search ‘absolute time site:greasyfork.org’ on a search engine, and you’ll find how many people are fighting against relative time.

Ryza    2023-04-09 👍 👎 [op]

@tsetien #4 The problem you raised has been solved on other websites. When the time is greater than 12 months, the specific time will be displayed, such as 2022-4-1. You can think of the problem, and the product manager has thought of it, man.

tsetien    2023-04-09 👍 👎

The point is, even as short as ‘one week ago’, its definition is still vague and confusing and wastes a lot of time to take in. Therefore, it’s useless and, in my opinion, brain-fucking.

tsetien    2023-04-09 👍 👎

And by the way, I did not object to its being included as an option. I just pointed out that to many people like me, relative time is utterly useless and annoying, with proof that many userscripts were written to counteract it. So why are you even not content with this?

freedit    2023-04-10 👍 👎

In the beginning, I kept only date just for privacy.