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?”

  • TheLeadenSea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    5·
    4 days ago

    Idk about the rest of it, but unselectable probably puts the css property user-select: none;, and can be overridden by a browser extension

    • layzerjeyt@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
      2·
      4 days ago

      I had a quick peek at the style.css:

      .user-select-none{
    -webkit-user-select:none!important;
    -moz-user-select:none!important;
    user-select:none!important
}

      I know I could use Stylus or Greasemonkey to override that rule. It works when I try it in the inspector. But is there a way to get the full date out of "data-tippy-content" and redirect it to the displayed page?