I’ve never looked at a datetime and thought to myself “if only I knew how long ago that was.” Are there really people like that?
And actually, if I saw the date of “2023-12-07,” knowing it was last December actually gives me more information than “eight months ago” — because I know that means around Christmas time last year, and I know what other things happened last December, such as what features we were launching, who the product manager was at the time, etc. If you just shouted a random number of months ago, I would then have to stop and think about the answers to those questions. Lots of my memories could be placed in an approximate month or at least a season, and those never change after the fact. Relative dates are constantly changing and my memory does not increment all its records every month (e.g. “I’ve now worked here 9 months. I’ve now worked here 10 months.” But I can tell you the month and the year I started working here.)
Relative dates are definitely a case of “just because we can do this doesn’t mean we should force everyone to use it”
And actually, if I saw the date of “2023-12-07,” knowing it was last December actually gives me more information than “eight months ago” — because I know that means around Christmas time last year, and I know what other things happened last December, such as what features we were launching, who the product manager was at the time, etc. If you just shouted a random number of months ago, I would then have to stop and think about the answers to those questions. Lots of my memories could be placed in an approximate month or at least a season, and those never change after the fact. Relative dates are constantly changing and my memory does not increment all its records every month (e.g. “I’ve now worked here 9 months. I’ve now worked here 10 months.” But I can tell you the month and the year I started working here.)
Relative dates are definitely a case of “just because we can do this doesn’t mean we should force everyone to use it”