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There is a for this, but I'm actually raising this as a , as I'm not asking for a feature; the feature exists already (and will continue to on every other site that isn't Stack Overflow). This is a bug; either due to a regression, or (at best) an oversight and has adverse effects on accessibility.

On the new comment layout, once a comment reaches an "age" of "over a year ago", that becomes its timestamp value. This is regardless of whether the comment was posted one year and a second ago, or 17 years and three months ago. The only way to access the actual date and time is by hovering over the "timestamp" and waiting for the tooltip to load. This is a severe accessibility and data quality problem as some devices, such as screen readers or touchscreen devices, cannot access tooltips. This means that from such devices comments created on 2024-08-28, 2015-04-13, and 2009-10-19 would appear to have been posted on the same date, i.e. at some point over a year ago.

The timestamps of comments are valuable; technology evolves and what might have been "good" or "acceptable" in 2010 might not be in a version from or after 2023. Many comments are directly concerned with these technological changes, but users now have no easy way to see that crucial context. Moreover, seeing the timestamp made it easy to see if a comment is relevant to the current revision of the post; if the post was (last) edited in 2022 you have no (easy) way of finding out if the comments were made before that edit or after.

The timestamps on comments need to be restored to work the way they do now, where after 2 days they show the full date and time, not some vague and useless statement.

For reference, here are what timestamps look like currently:
image showing 3 comments, with the timestamps 'Aug 13, 2019 at 10:38', 'Aug 13, 2019 at 10:46', and 'Jun 26, 2021 at 1:29'

And what they will look in the graduated experiment:
image showing 3 comments, with the timestamps 'Over a year ago', 'Over a year ago', and 'Over a year ago'

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    I asked this in another response - what would be the ideal place/format for this kind of information? A lot of recent feedback has been that comments are ephemeral in nature, yet the feedback here seems to be about comments providing useful additional context to an answer. Can they be both? Commented Sep 1 at 11:13
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    I think that the timestamp of a comment and that comments are ephemeral in nature are entirely unrelated, @Connell . But there are certainly some comments that do, and will continue, to provide good feedback to the answer. A common one I see is in regards to heavily upvoted answers that suffer from SQL injection; no matter how many downvotes they get they continue to be scored well. The only way we can warn users would be in a comment, and an edit would conflict with the authors intent. Commented Sep 1 at 11:44
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    In truth, @Connell , the "thought train" of "Comments are often deleted so we should hide their creation date" is entirely illogical. Commented Sep 1 at 11:45
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    Let's pretend today's comments weren't "the only way" - what would be best way to display this information? Sometimes we've discussed having two types of comments (one for ephemeral suggestions, one for additional context). Or we could lean into the ephemeral nature and encourage adding a section to the answer and marking the old comments as "resolved"? Commented Sep 1 at 12:14
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    Until such a feature is implemented that discussion point is moot, @Connell . We have comments at the moment, and only comments. The timestamp is valuable information. Commented Sep 1 at 12:25
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    @Connell This bug report is purely about the new comments having timestamps with no time resolution beyond a year. There is no good reason not to just write out the date for comments older than 2 days, so the straightforward fix would be to fix that timestamp formatting. Everything else you're discussing here would be a much larger discussion that isn't quickly solved in the comments here Commented Sep 1 at 12:26
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    @Connell The "comments are ephemeral" is more aspirational, not the reality for all comments on the site. Many comments are ephemeral and get removed after the post was edited and they became obsolete. But in many other cases the comments contain information, but this isn't edited into the posts for various reasons. You also don't need nested comments if they are meant to be purely ephemeral, so the new changes are already going in a different direction. Commented Sep 1 at 12:30
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    This post isn't a [discussion], @Connell , it's a [bug] report; the timestamps are uninformative and need fixing (the votes on this post and the linked "[feature-request]" give you enough indication this is a problem (but then Stack Overflow Inc are want to ignore vote counts...)). If you, or Stack Overflow Inc, want to discuss new ideas for the comments, and have 2 versions, you should post that as you're own post which should be a [discussion]. You can then, most likely, ignore community input there too... Commented Sep 1 at 12:30
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    Rather than try to discuss ideas, as well, @Connell , if Stack Overflow Inc have a "meaningful" reason to make accessibility for older comments worse, then post an answer here as to why it's like that so that users can vote on the reasoning; that's why we have a voting system. Commented Sep 1 at 12:33
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    @Connell It can be both. By design a post should be free standing and we edit information from answers. Comments sometimes can be clarifications that don't fit into an answer without matching the intent of the OP, or mention caveats. What comments are not is extended discussion. In some cases - some information's only valid for specific versions of a software or language, say if it involves a bug, and then the age of the post is vitally important. This comment provides context and clarification. Its not part of an answer. Should it serve its purpose, I wouldn't mind it going away. Commented Sep 1 at 12:42
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    Fair enough. Perhaps we can have that discussion another time. Commented Sep 1 at 12:51
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    This change is so bad. A majority of the useful questions and answers are over a year old, if it used a grandpa emoji it would show the exact same amount of information as it does now. Comments are mostly ephemeral because a lot of them are useless, and anything useful either gets upvoted + highlighted (also broken with the new design!) or edited into the parent context. Commented Sep 5 at 16:06
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    @Connell is there any chance of that discussion happened before Stack Overflow Inc graduate the experiment? The votes on the posts around this experiment should be telling you (and Stack Overflow Inc) that that the feature isn't going to be received well by the people you rely on most for good content (askers and commenters are rarely these), and it's going to be harmful to Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow Inc need to understand that you've shunning away the SMEs that still contribute, that the slowly shrinking asker user base relies on. Commented Sep 12 at 10:32
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    Honestly, as long as the end product doesn't have the "over a year ago" text, I don't think anyone minds which is the dupe target. I could always dupe this and move the [status-review] tag. Commented Oct 9 at 20:03
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    Is that (part of a) user script to revert the change, @biziclop ? If so, then posting that as an answer here would likely be beneficial for users that visit this page; it means that even if Stack Overflow Inc don't change the site behaviour, users can change it themselves. Commented Oct 29 at 10:40

2 Answers 2

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I don't even see any rationale to essentially remove all time resolution after a comment is a year old. It doesn't save any significant amount of space.

This is a direct comparison of the text length for new and old timestamps:

Over a year ago
Jul 13, 2014 at 15:53

The old ones are slightly longer, but they would be shorter if you omitted the time and only showed the date. Which I think would be absolutely an option for older comments, as the time of day isn't important then.

This timestamp is also not in a position in the new design where you'd need to save space anyway. So I don't think space-saving is a valid reason here.

Leaves just "it looks nicer" to me as possible justifications, and I just don't buy that. It would be anyway too much of a reduction in information, and it doesn't even look any nicer to me. Relative timestamps are nicer for very short durations like "5 minutes ago", but they don' have any value for long durations like this, especially if you also cap them at a year.

I also don't think these timestamps increase engagement, so I really have no idea why SE would do that, and so far I haven't seen any actual justification for this specific aspect of the new design.

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    I tried to give some context of our hypothesis here. But it's probably best that someone more qualified than me gives a full answer to this Commented Sep 1 at 12:55
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    @Connell Thanks, that is at least an explanation. Though I think that idea is misguided, there's a reason people avoid commenting on old stuff and that is that they are unlikely to trigger a good conversation, or even any conversation at all. So you likely would not get good, persistent engagement from that anyway. And you're fundamentally deceiving people to get them to comment more, which I think is a bad idea in any case. Commented Sep 1 at 13:45
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    It was not easy to find the comment linked in the previous Connel's comment : "To give a bit of context - the hypothesis here is that users (especially newer users) might feel less inclined to reply to comments from, say, 2015. We just want to see if this makes a difference. – Connell Staff Mod CommentedJul 9 at 11:24" Commented Sep 1 at 15:42
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    "To give a bit of context - the hypothesis here is that users (especially newer users) might feel less inclined to reply to comments from, say, 2015." Why does that matter, @Connell ? Comments aren't a discussion space, as the community has constantly informed Stack Overflow Inc; it's not an issue that new users don't want to reply to a comment from 10 years ago. There is (read was) an area of the site for discussions: Discussions. If you want users to discuss the answer then make that discussion space available and fix the problems with it. Commented Sep 1 at 15:56
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    Am I reading the "smell" correctly here, @Connell , and the reason that Stack Overflow Inc have made comment timestamps useless is because you want discussions in comments? Is that the real reason you binned Discussions? Commented Sep 1 at 15:58
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    @ThomA I'll ask around to see if someone can give you a more detailed answer. Commented Sep 1 at 16:45
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    Or we could just use a sane date-time format: 2014-07-13 15:53 which is only 1 character longer than over a year ago. Commented Sep 2 at 8:47
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    @Connell Why exactly is getting more responses to comments prioritized over comments being useful? Why is "more comments" a goal in itself at all? That seems to be the driving force of this whole redesign and it's never been explained as far as I've seen. Commented Sep 2 at 17:56
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    @Connell I'm not a new user, but to me "over a year ago" sounds more like "don't answer" than a timestamp that looks exactly like the other timestamps on other comments. Commented Oct 20 at 13:57
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    For me, using a format of 2014-05-04 for comments older than a year would be totally fine. Or what Ian suggests. But this implies people knowing ISO dates Commented Oct 20 at 13:58
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    I'm a regular user of this site, and generally when I need information, I start by searching for a question, read that question, then read the comments and only then read the answers. Why would anybody invent a reason for removing comments in an automatic way, when they regularly contain very valuable information? Commented Oct 31 at 14:14
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Eliminating the persistent time stamp for a hover stamp is obviously a bad idea since the timestamp provides valuable information and there is now no way to see a series of stamps simultaneously. I'm supposed to hover over each and remember all the dates for each comment and then looking at each question and seeing the dates in my mind like playing chess blindfolded against multiple opponents, evaluate which are worth reading or apply to my situation? If this is supposed create more comments, or greater engagement, it will have the opposite effect. Rather than seeing an old comment and being motivated to provide new information, I'll just skip reading comments altogether, unless I'm desparate, because I'm not going to hover to find the dates.

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