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 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.
I like it, as long as the absolute date is still visible when you hover over.
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.
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
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.
Fuckin seriously. No shit it was yesterday, but WHEN? I got like 200 messages “yesterday”, and they didn’t all come in at once.