Whenever I use relative dates, I usually draw the line at either one week or one month, after which I go to absolute dates. It can be cognitively challenging to see a date from two days ago and work out whether it was two days or one day, hey, today's Thursday right so that was Tuesday etc., whereas from 2012 a timestamp from 2009 isn't cognitively challenging to read as "years ago", and if you want the precision, it's there.
Personally when I've done it I often also simply always have the absolute time: "Wednesday, August 22nd at 8:22PM (a day ago)", with the order of the two elements chosen depending on which makes more sense.
That'd be an improvement in HN, imo. Times like "12 minutes ago" or "3 hours ago" or even "9 days ago" are fine, but "1612 days ago" requires me to mentally convert to figure out when that actually was.
The problem you are describing isn't a problem with relative dates. It is simply imprecision. You can make relative dates that are precise (e.g. 783 days and 4 hours ago), and you can make absolute dates that are imprecise (e.g. 2010).
Now you're just being pedantic - displaying the number of days since a picture was taken is not worse than not being able to differentiate past 12 moths.
No, he isn't being pedantic. It's a real, valid usability issue.
"783 days and 4 hours ago" really is worse. If I am browsing a photo and look at that, my first reaction is "That photo was taken a long time ago". If my buddy asks when that happened, I'll have to start doing some simple math in my head. "Uhh, around two years ago? So what, that's 2010?"
Simply putting the date would have been a much friendly solution. You know immediately that it was "a long time ago" because everyone knows what the current year is. And you know what year immediately.
Conversely, on short scales it's opposite. I don't really care if a post was on Monday or Tuesday (usually). I care that it was recent. Providing the exact timestamp doesn't help.
Think about the task of correlating online events with events from your memory.
Suppose you see a quote from you, saying something rude that seems out of character. Knowing that it was however many hundreds of days ago is useless; see that it was July 27, 2011, at 4am, and you'll say "oh, yeah, somewhere in late July we had X and Y over drinking into the wee hours... those #%#$%s must have been futzing with my computer after I fell asleep, and somehow I never noticed".
Most importantly -- you have to predict the reasons people will be looking at dates, and this varies. Gmail shows both because they can't guess; email can carry so much different stuff.
HN post/comment timestamps beyond a few days ago can be notated in number of days as far as I'm concerned; I don't need to know what year, even -- just "this is old".
The timestamp on a blood sugar reading should include time of day (and possibly day of week even) -- a full timestamp, minimum -- to be useful.
Well, see, I would just print the date that's there in the database in the first place. How is "864 days ago" useful information? Doesn't everyone at least convert it to the number of years it stands for?
Relative dates are effective up to a point. People think relatively about events for perhaps a month or two. Past that it probably becomes more effective to use absolute dates.
+1. I'm not a fan of relative dates as a user (although I maybe a too "scientific" mind) but I can't see any other way to display dates if timezone matters.
When timezone no longer matters, e.g. after a few days, then I would switch back to absolute dates exactly to avoid such incomparable expressions.
What does this mean? Is this picture older or newer than the other picture, also labeled "More than one year ago"?