{"id":40786,"date":"2023-10-13T18:03:15","date_gmt":"2023-10-13T22:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=40786"},"modified":"2023-10-15T08:17:40","modified_gmt":"2023-10-15T12:17:40","slug":"relative-time-labels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/13\/relative-time-labels\/","title":{"rendered":"Relative Time Labels"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nikita Prokopov<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Why is nobody excited about these “yesterday”\/“2 days ago”\/“a week ago” labels?<\/p>

Because they pretend to speak human language, but they actually don’t. For a human, yesterday is “at the day before”, “between 0am..11:59pm the day before today”.<\/p>

No human uses “less that 24 hours” as the definition of “yesterday”. Computers, unfortunately, do. Add here that different implementations calculate “yesterday” differently (even on the same service) → lack of trust → less useful.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Anything longer ago than yesterday should just say the actual date. It’s absurd that I sometimes need to subtract 9 or 12 days, and “borrow” from the previous month, to figure out when something actually happened. (Sometimes it’s in the tooltip or URL slug, but not always.)<\/p>\n

I don’t find relative times particularly useful, either, because some sites will reload-in-place to keep them up-to-date, but others won’t. So “1 hour ago” could mean actually<\/em> one hour ago or it could mean “one hour before I opened that tab.”<\/p>\n\n

Update (2023-10-14): See also: Hacker News<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nikita Prokopov: Why is nobody excited about these “yesterday”\/“2 days ago”\/“a week ago” labels?Because they pretend to speak human language, but they actually don’t. For a human, yesterday is “at the day before”, “between 0am..11:59pm the day before today”.No human uses “less that 24 hours” as the definition of “yesterday”. Computers, unfortunately, do. Add here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2023-10-13T22:03:17Z","apple_news_api_id":"62d6682c-e27c-4747-855f-8774246170c5","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2023-10-14T17:46:47Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAQ==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AYtZoLOJ8R0eFX4d0JGFwxQ","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[77,31,30,364,1227,96],"class_list":["post-40786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-design","tag-ios","tag-mac","tag-time","tag-top-posts","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40786"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40786\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40798,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40786\/revisions\/40798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}