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In the new comment layout experiment (2025), comments are being labelled with "Over a year ago" instead of the actual date. Why would you seek to hide this information? In my opinion it's just making the site harder to use.

Let's fix this by showing the actual date of comments instead of an unhelpful approximation.

Yes, I do realize that there is still an exact-date tooltip, but some others may not and frankly the tooltip is harder to use than just looking at the timestamp normally.

Here's a screenshot of an old comment of mine. You can see the tooltip saying that it's from 2017.

enter image description here

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    This is related to A/B testing in this experiment, right? If yes, you could consider moving this info to an answer there. Otherwise we might need a screenshot because I'm not seeing it and I tried to find posts with enough comments: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1907507 Commented Jul 15, 2025 at 18:36
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    @rene Thanks for the pointer. Looks like this was pointed out before: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/434473/4476484 Commented Jul 15, 2025 at 18:41
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    Worse yet, in the new experiment layout, the datetime stamp is no longer a hyperlink. Regression! Commented Jul 15, 2025 at 19:56
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    @TylerH yes, noticed that as well, very annoying, you can still get the link through the "…" menu with as many clicks (assuming you'd usually just "right click" → "copy link") that being said there really isn't a reason to not also have the date hyperlinked. Commented Jul 15, 2025 at 20:32
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    Ahh yes, hide more stuff behind an area of the site that isn't accessible of touch devices... That's accessibility... Not to mention that is doesnt even respect the logic for other stuff. That "date stamp" shpuld at least say "Over 7 years ago" Commented Jul 16, 2025 at 8:04
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    Considering how old answers can, and are, updated frequently, and it's now impossible to tell if the comments are older than the revision at a glance (or all events are 1+ years ago), yes that is a problem, @Gimby . Dates might be "boring" to you, but they are far more informative. I, for one, don't give my date of birth as "more than 1 year", or the current year as "More than 1 year since the birth of Jesus", nor would I answer the qusetion "when did you join the company?" with "More than 1 year ago." It's not helpful information. Commented Jul 16, 2025 at 11:52
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    @Gimby Maybe I'm too curious for my own good, but I'd rather know whether a comment was from 15 years ago or from last year. To me, at least, that can make a difference and I can easier spot comments to potentially flag. Maybe that's not how I'm supposed to be using the information - do let me know if I'm reading and interpreting information wrong, and how I can do it right. Note that I am often browsing without using my mouse, so if the correct way is "Just hover over everything", I'm even more wrong in how I use the internet and would have to adapt. Despite my wrist discomfort. Commented Jul 17, 2025 at 10:13
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    Is there any way to opt out of the A/B test? I don't mind the other changes, but this change is killing my productivity Commented Aug 15, 2025 at 14:53
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    Quick plug for this blog post (from "more than a year ago" 😝) on how to make relative date displays actually useful: rwec.co.uk/q/reltime Commented Aug 15, 2025 at 15:56
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    this is the most infuriating UI change I have seen in a very long time and i am easily offended by "designers" breaking my workflow so i notice such things regularly. the date of comments on some questions/answers are the key information ffs. it's detrimental to usability to hide this behind what's basically an extra button. Commented Sep 12, 2025 at 10:19
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    Please get rid of the "Over a year ago" for the dates. It's way more than just comments now and it's really annoying. There's so much old information on Stack Overflow that you need to be able to see if what you're reading is relevant at a glance, not have to hover over the label. Commented Sep 27, 2025 at 16:06
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    SO: This comment was "Over a year ago" - Me (hovers): "2011-07-..." - That's more like over a decade ago. Commented Oct 1, 2025 at 6:31
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    See the Next Steps section of the Graduation Annoucement, @RokeJulianLockhart . Commented Nov 20, 2025 at 9:19
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    Do not think for a minute that anything less that full restoration of the time stamp is necessary. It is sometimes important to see who left what when, down to the minute. Commented Nov 27, 2025 at 3:24
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    I'm glad it seems we can opt-out of this for now, but I dread the day this becomes a permanent feature. I have no problem with showing a humanized relative time really, but the fact that it caps at one year is... baffling? At a glance, any given "Over a year ago" comment could've either been written in 2023 or 2010. I was just reading an answer where I only decided to check the date and saw that it was in fact left in 2010 because the comment mentioned using Python 2.6. Again, relative time is fine, just count the years beyond one, at least. Commented Dec 18, 2025 at 19:04

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It's been a while since I've contributed to Stack Overflow and I wasn't planning on writing this. I guess it's a sign of how broken this feature is that I'm here. You see, I'm deep down a rabbit hole where I find myself trying to rebuild my blog and it's so slow. So I did some searching and to came to a Stack Overflow answer that seemed promising. Here are the comments:

Comments praising an answer about how to fix a Jekyll problem.

I wasn't reading super carefully just yet and I saw "a year ago" kinda out of the corner of my eye. So I got excited that the answer would work for me too! After a few minutes poking around my config file and the Jekyll documentation, I discovered that the problem was fixed in 2019. Therefore that answer was outdated "over a year ago".

Could I have seen the hover text? Not a chance. I've had years to learn to do this and it's just not happening. Could I have seen the date on the answer? Sure! But having (what looked like) recent comments saying the answer worked seemed like this was a perennially useful answer. You don't have to look far to see example. The very next answer was the one I've started using.^[The --limit_posts 1 option, not --incremental, which is still unacceptably slow for a REPL.]

No problem, I thought, I'll just leave a comment explaining that the answer is outdated. You can clearly see that comment right here:

Show 1 more comment

I'm just baffled that this comment UI still exists. It makes comments take up more space on the page, which indicates they are more important than answers. It deliberately hides useful metadata about the comments. Nothing has been done to prevent trivial comments from hiding useful comments. What are we doing here?

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    Wow, that's a lot of "thanks" comments Commented Jan 23 at 19:48
  • @Anerdw: It was a genuinely great answer . . . in 2015. Commented Jan 23 at 19:49
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    I meant that we tend to NLN them. Commented Jan 23 at 19:51
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    I still don't understand what the intended goal of that change was. was it "Hey lets hide the date so our content doesn't look so old!"? or... Commented Jan 23 at 19:56
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    @user400654: Presumably the lawyers are worried Disney would sue if they used their original phrase: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." Commented Jan 23 at 20:02
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    actually, i know exactly why they did it. Not knowing a comment is 8 years old rather than maybe one year increases the chance someone will reply to it. engagement over functionality/usefulness. Commented Jan 23 at 20:05
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    @user400654: If so, that's remarkably shortsighted. I left a comment there and unless this meta post draws attention to it, I'm not getting any feedback from commenting on a decade-old question. And not getting feedback discourages more activity. Commented Jan 23 at 20:50
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    Curious that it seems the comments referenced in this 3-hour-old answer seem to have been deleted... Commented Jan 23 at 22:48
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    @nullromo: Fixing the problem one answer at a time. Commented Jan 23 at 23:37
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    It's very short-sighted. With one stupid change, they've made millions of comments less useful. And it's even worse on a touchscreen device, where you can't hover. It's possible to see the comment timestamps in the timeline, but that's a pain, and involves horizontal scrolling on a phone. Commented Jan 25 at 5:19
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    Oh wow, Jon Ericsson, haven't seen you around in a while, welcome back! The last I saw was definitely over a year ago. Commented Jan 25 at 16:11
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    For reference: meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/433817/… "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." It was an experiment, and afaik we've never seen data related to its results. but given it was never gone back on, either they liked the results or this just isn't an important enough thing to stack for them to spend dev resources on. Commented Jan 26 at 21:55

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