What exactly is gained here by writing "last week" instead of the precise timestamp?
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What exactly is gained here by writing "last week" instead of the precise timestamp? It's not like there's a lack of space there either.
I see this UX mistake very often. It's maddening. GitHub is one of the worst offenders. Instagram is also guilty of this with its "3214 weeks ago".
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@grishka to me it's slightly better UX to see human readable time intervals like that for relatively short periods of time. It's easier to reason about someone that was last online last week, than someone was seen on the 8th of Jan 2025. For intervals longer than a couple of months I'm ambivalent...
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@mariusor but the problem with that is that "last week" loses an entire week of precision. Such a timestamp provides no useful information. I can understand it with "X hours ago", but any units larger than an hour are meh because an unacceptable amount of precision is lost
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@grishka why do you need more precision for this thing though? Why does it matter if it's been 7 days ago, or 13?
I don’t exactly remember the rules I'm personally using for human readable dates but I think I have smth like 1,8 weeks... Which one might argue it's not much better...
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@grishka I do like it though. For me getting sense of time with absolute dates can be a little tricky, and here it just says the thing happened past week, and provides ability to view the full date if necessary. I think it's actually great. Instagram example is not great, on the other hand. I think after a week it doesn't make much sense to have relative date, but where date is not important and UI is constrained, providing relative time is fine, but only AS LONG as there option to view date
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On social media this perhaps is fine.
But I've seen this in dev tools like GitHub and CircleCI where you often need precise dates to see the broken commit, the artifacts that went into prod etc.
Google Cloud at one point had relative dates and then US-formatted dates *in logs*
It's like these companies don't use their own products.
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@brawaru to me these kinds of relative dates, even when they don't lose precision (which this one does), feel like analog clocks: you have to make effort and do math to read them. I tend to think about time in exact numbers.
I'm fine with "today"/"yesterday" instead of dates, and "X minutes ago" as long as it's less than 60.
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@grishka Yeah this is super annoying. I think humanized timestamps are nice but clearly it should be "6 days ago", not "last week"
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