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?”

  • DigitalDilemma@lemmy.mlEnglish
    10·
    4 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and do find advice, to only find out after trying it that it refers to a version of the software that’s now very out of date.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.