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'm running into this problem in a little web app I wrote for myself. If the tooltip text is selectable and you try to select the hoverable text, it'll sometimes's also select the tooltip text. It's annoying when you're trying to copy something. Just not annoying enough to fix yet.
So you have to make a choice in what is more valuable to make available to the user. I think relative time is more useful since I'm more concerned about how recently it was posted, and I don't want to math it out in my head every time.
If I had to make a general rule I would say relative dates for recent but precise for older. "1 hour" is good enough in a lot of cases but "2 years" is too vague.
A fancier UI could have a user setting for what dates to display, or if you click the date it changes to the other format. Maybe even for all dates on the page so it could be quickly toggled. Or clicking the date selects/copies it.
Admittedly a very marginal use case so for a small software, might not be a good use of time.
I think text on the page should be selectable but tooltips should not. Although I do generally appreciate lemmy's overall use of
user-select: nonebecause it omits all the little icons like voting and reply which are unlikely needed and clutter up destination text file. I don't always love how it skips thelinkicon because then I need to copy it separately. (Combining the timestamp with thelinkin the way of old blog trackbacks is still logical.)Unless I'm trying doing some internet sleuthing, I don't think I've ever ran into a scenario where "2 years ago" was insufficient precision, let alone having the need to copy the exact timestamp with any frequency. I'm curious about what your use case is.
Anything with time sensitivity, context or relation to other events.
Haven't you ever read something very differently that was written Jan 2020 compared to April 2020? They're both "5 years ago". Or sometimes people will reference current events in passing. If someone mentions "what trump just did" you need to know with more granularity than 1 year to understand.
More mundanely, "Indiana stinks this time of year" is meaningless without knowing the date.