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why do web developers make it hard to see/copy the date of posts and comments? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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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?"

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[-] Robin@lemmy.world 30 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I can't explain the unselectable property, but displaying relative time is considered good UX.

[-] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 23 points 3 days ago

I kind of despise relative time. You see a bunch of stuff that says "yesterday" but can't tell exactly when without taking more actions. Just tell me the date time I'm not a child.

[-] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 8 points 2 days ago

Fuckin seriously. No shit it was yesterday, but WHEN? I got like 200 messages "yesterday", and they didn't all come in at once.

[-] Robin@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago

I like it, as long as the absolute date is still visible when you hover over.

[-] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 9 points 3 days ago

At work I had a page with 50 "friendly" dates and I had to figure out with ones were wrong. They all said like "yesterday". Hell. Could have hovered over each one and taken notes, I guess, but that would suck. Had to use the dev tools and do a lot more thinking than just looking at them.

[-] bluespin@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago

Ideally you'd have a better place to work with that data than a UI that is displaying relative dates. Internal reporting data you can query for instance

[-] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 6 points 3 days ago

Maybe, but the bug report was it was showing them in the "wrong order" in the UI. I could look at the API response but then I need to map that to what's displayed somehow. I think I used the dev tools to run js on the page to get the actual dates in one go (since that was in the dom), but that kind of sucks. A customer certainly isn't going to do that. They see a bunch of stuff that all says "yesterday" or "two weeks ago" and they need to do extra work to get information that we went out of our way to hide.

[-] communism@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 days ago

I can see why the average user might prefer relative timestamps but I for one would prefer absolute timestamps. It would be nice to get a toggle—wouldn't exactly be much work to implement and maintain.

[-] Whelks_chance@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago

I hate it. If I interact with a system in anything more than a very sporadic way, I end up with multiple objects on screen that all say "created just now" which is completely unhelpful.

Luckily most systems can re-enable actual time again (even if it is buried in a settings menu) so I can see what's actually happening.

[-] dev_null@lemmy.ml 26 points 3 days ago

It's interesting you say they "obscure it", where in your example they went out of their way to make it possible to see the precise date and time when you hover over the relative time. They could easily not add the tooltip and yet they did.

Why is it not selectable? My guess is that most people would want to select the content of the comment but accidentally also select the time since it's very close to it, so to make it easier to select just the content, they made the time unselectable. It's a tradeoff but helps in more cases than it harms. Just a guess though.

[-] dev_null@lemmy.ml 26 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Looking into git commits, the unselectable property was added by @dessalines@lemmy.ml, so maybe we can get an answer right from the source instead of guessing?

[-] dessalines@lemmy.ml 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

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.

[-] laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 days ago

I disagree that this software could be functional without some way to show the date. That is a basic functionality.

Having to hover over each individual comment or post rather than displaying on the page means it's obscured. You can't see it unless you do something, and then you can only see it for a moment. Even if you want to manually transcribe the date, you can't type in one window and have that tooltip active in the other so you need to go back and forth unless you can memorize the whole thing at once.

Whether it is a good design decision as is another matter, I can see why you wouldn't want the full date/time displayed in all situations. Maybe I'm just a freak for wanting to copy the dates.

[-] dev_null@lemmy.ml 16 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I think "20 minutes ago" is a lot more useful than seeing the full date on every comment and having to do mental math. It does make it harder to see the precise date, but that's a far less common use case, so the tradeoff goes towards making it more usable for the more common scenario. So I see that as the reason: it's usually better. The full date is still available on hover, which seems reasonable to me.

I disagree with your premise that web developers "want to make it hard", as that isn't the motivation. The motivation is to make it easy to see when a comment was posted, which is far more useful as relative time. That it makes it harder to copy the full date is not the goal, but an unfortunate side-effect of the tooltip disappearing when you stop hovering over the relative time. Which I'm sure you could submit as an issue to the lemmy devs, because likely it just never came up, and isn't some evil plot to "make it hard on purpose".

[-] laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago

I disagree with your premise that web developers “want to make it hard”, as that isn’t the motivation.

Yes that is fair enough it is unlikely to be a correct characterization. I was just annoyed and feeling persecuted by people who make a great platform that I love using.

[-] OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 4 points 2 days ago

I think it's to make it neat when you're copying it

They should be clickable to copy, or make it an option in settings

[-] nodoze313@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Jira does this, it's so freaking stupid, I can easily determine how long ago it was by seeing it myself, I want to know when a comment happened explicitly not relatively. And the extra step of hovering over is obnoxious. It really becomes annoying when the duration increases and it becomes approximate, I need to know when they commented exactly, so I can determine if that aligns with whatever I'm comparing it to, hours and days matter. *Fixed typo

[-] lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago

You could write a Greasemonkey script that flips them back. It’s just a UX choice

[-] digdilem@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 days ago

I'm not a developer at any of these sites, but a couple of guesses:

  1. They genuinely think relative dates are a more user friendly experience.

  2. They know they serve old content, but want it to appear relevant. I've seen social media do this on several platforms where they obscure the date entirely on content that is not very fresh. This can be frustrating when you're searching for an answer to a technical question and do find advice, to only find out after trying it that it refers to a version of the software that's now very out of date.

  3. SEO. Tricks like this might help the page rank higher in search engines. (I don't know, I'm not an expert and SEO annoys me, but it feels like something designers might do to trick the engines)

Neither is a technical reason, it's going to be about design, marketing and aesthetics.

Ublock will block what's displayed, but not show you the actual. Something like UserScripts would allow you to extract the dates from the html and display them, or perhaps some css tweaks to change how things are displayed. But these would need tailoring for every single site you want and be liable to break if they change anything on their end.

Alternatively, you may wish to search sites for their Accessibility settings, or explore software that tries to do this for you - or even contact the sites and ask them to make the dates more readable on accessibility grounds.

[-] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 5 points 3 days ago

You seem unable to grasp two things:

A full timestamp is rarely useful for anyone but you. It takes up a lot of horizontal screen real estate.

It's pretty simple. No need to make it something weird that devs are inflicting on you.

[-] TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 days ago

Idk about the rest of it, but unselectable probably puts the css property user-select: none;, and can be overridden by a browser extension

[-] laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

I had a quick peek at the style.css:

.user-select-none{
    -webkit-user-select:none!important;
    -moz-user-select:none!important;
    user-select:none!important
}

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?

[-] cryptTurtle@piefed.social 4 points 3 days ago

I've never built a real social media platform, but as a developer no one has actually asked me to make text hard to copy. I do notice it all over the place especially on mobile tho (which is easy to get around these days). Just a weird trend with the big names I guess

[-] cupcakezealot@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 points 3 days ago

because webdevs don't know squat about actual ux/ui design

[-] howrar@lemmy.ca 3 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

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: none because 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 the link icon because then I need to copy it separately. (Combining the timestamp with the link in the way of old blog trackbacks is still logical.)

[-] howrar@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 days ago

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.

[-] laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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.

[-] Nemo@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 days ago

Hmmm. When I wrote the blogging code for my personal website, I never even displayed the timestamp, only the manually entered day and week. I know why I did that –because linear time is an illusion– but I never thought about it as being any departure from the norm because I was not used to seeing explicit timestamps on posts at that time. Give me a little time and I can check the surviving social media of the era to see if my recollection matches reality.

[-] Nemo@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 days ago

Nope, I was wrong. Older social media like fora and livejournal show explicit timestamps, I just never looked at them for the same reason I don't own any clocks (because linear time is an illusion).

Example 1

Example 2

So this might be a more recent trend and I can't say why with confidence, since I'm not a social media engineer.

[-] laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago

Nice investigation. :)

If you will go as far back as LJ and phpBB I wouldn't expect the dates to be relative because it would be extra work for the server. You would have to generate all the dates every time the page loaded? Using... perl? Sounds too demanding. And since everyone was browsing from a computer, not a tiny phone, screen real estate wasn't at such a premium.

For disallowing selection, the support for user-select has only recently become fully supported across the board.

[-] laserjet@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago

Fantastic I look forward to it.

this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2025
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