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 disagree that this software could be functional without some way to show the date. That is a basic functionality.
Having to hover over each individual comment or post rather than displaying on the page means it’s obscured. You can’t see it unless you do something, and then you can only see it for a moment. Even if you want to manually transcribe the date, you can’t type in one window and have that tooltip active in the other so you need to go back and forth unless you can memorize the whole thing at once.
Whether it is a good design decision as is another matter, I can see why you wouldn’t want the full date/time displayed in all situations. Maybe I’m just a freak for wanting to copy the dates.
I think “20 minutes ago” is a lot more useful than seeing the full date on every comment and having to do mental math. It does make it harder to see the precise date, but that’s a far less common use case, so the tradeoff goes towards making it more usable for the more common scenario. So I see that as the reason: it’s usually better. The full date is still available on hover, which seems reasonable to me.
I disagree with your premise that web developers “want to make it hard”, as that isn’t the motivation. The motivation is to make it easy to see when a comment was posted, which is far more useful as relative time. That it makes it harder to copy the full date is not the goal, but an unfortunate side-effect of the tooltip disappearing when you stop hovering over the relative time. Which I’m sure you could submit as an issue to the lemmy devs, because likely it just never came up, and isn’t some evil plot to “make it hard on purpose”.
Yes that is fair enough it is unlikely to be a correct characterization. I was just annoyed and feeling persecuted by people who make a great platform that I love using.