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 believe all tooltips were made unselectable since they're supposed to be detail popups, and also should dissappear when your mouse leaves the area. I have no idea the use case for someone needing to manually copy and paste timestamps (and those aren't even formatted with rfc3339) into a document... at that point you might as well use one of the many API clients or curl and parse the data yourself.
Anyways this community isn't an issue tracker, they should open up an issue on lemmy-ui for something like this.