I absolutely hate fuzzy dates, not only because of the problem you mentioned, but also because they can get wildly inaccurate. For example, on youtube I often see something counted as posted a year ago, but if I look at the absolute timestamp, it was actually 1 year and 10 months. That’s too big of a difference to truncate.
This shit is so annoying on GitHub. I feel like changes to a codebase are something that really makes sense to describe in hard dates and times. Telling me that some dumbass (me) introduced a bug “3 months ago” is not enough info, especially when it was actually 3 months and 24 days.
It’s a user friendly design.
2026-02-23 12:01 is so much ‘harder’ to parse at a glance than 1 minute ago.
Obviously this doesn’t care about archival or screenshots, it’s for the user looking at the live page.
I think it would be nice if sites offered option to toggle, but most have no reason for the extra investment.
I absolutely hate fuzzy dates, not only because of the problem you mentioned, but also because they can get wildly inaccurate. For example, on youtube I often see something counted as posted a year ago, but if I look at the absolute timestamp, it was actually 1 year and 10 months. That’s too big of a difference to truncate.
This shit is so annoying on GitHub. I feel like changes to a codebase are something that really makes sense to describe in hard dates and times. Telling me that some dumbass (me) introduced a bug “3 months ago” is not enough info, especially when it was actually 3 months and 24 days.
Fine, we will have oily dates.
I like my dates pitted
It’s a user friendly design.
2026-02-23 12:01 is so much ‘harder’ to parse at a glance than 1 minute ago.
Obviously this doesn’t care about archival or screenshots, it’s for the user looking at the live page.
I think it would be nice if sites offered option to toggle, but most have no reason for the extra investment.
True, but maybe a good compromise would be having the fuzzy date in parentheses/brackets if there’s enough space.