Stop Using Relative Timestamps

Thursday May 01st, 2025

Tags: blog, information, meta

I talked briefly in the previous entry about how much I value timestamps, and how frustrating it is to come across information and have no idea when it was presented. Well, as if to underline that point in red ink, I just came across a screenshot of a social media post from an application that showed the time posted as "8 hours ago".

Is it 8 hours ago... from the time the person posted the screenshot? Did they take the screenshot themselves? If not, do they have any idea when it was taken? What could have changed about the contents of the screenshot in the unknown amount of time since it was taken? Who knows?

Relative timestamps are but one small asssult on a healthy information space, but it's an easy fix: don't use them!

They're no good in the long term, either. If you come across an article that states it was published "177 days ago", can you say off the top of your head when that was? I can't. If I take a monute, I can think "Well, 180 days is half a year, so 6 months ago would've been like early November?" I still might not realize until putting it into Wolfram Alpha that 177 days ago was November 5, 2024. US election day. Potentially pretty important context!

And honestly, I usually wouldn't put in the effort, and I think most people wouldn't. Our brains just parse it as "awhile ago" and move on. Relative timestamps are no good for anything.

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