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?"
Idk about the rest of it, but unselectable probably puts the css property user-select: none;, and can be overridden by a browser extension
I had a quick peek at the
style.css:I know I could use Stylus or Greasemonkey to override that rule. It works when I try it in the inspector. But is there a way to get the full date out of
"data-tippy-content"and redirect it to the displayed page?