[HN Gopher] ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after ye...
___________________________________________________________________
ChatGPT conversations still lack timestamps after years of requests
Author : Valid3840
Score : 213 points
Date : 2025-12-26 12:39 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (community.openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (community.openai.com)
| Valid3840 wrote:
| ChatGPT still does not display per-message timestamps (time of
| day / date) in conversations.
|
| This has been requested consistently since early 2023 on the
| OpenAI community forum, with hundreds of comments and upvotes and
| deleted threads, yet remains unimplemented.
|
| Do any of you could think of a reason (UX-wise) for it not to be
| displayed?
| intrasight wrote:
| Sounds like an easy browser extension
| QuantumNomad_ wrote:
| Someone has already made a browser extension for Chrome to
| show the timestamps.
|
| https://github.com/Hangzhi/chatgpt-timestamp-extension
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kdjfhglijhebcchcfkk.
| ..
| noisem4ker wrote:
| For Chrome and Firefox.
| worldsavior wrote:
| Because he didn't say Firefox so he deserves downvotes?
| jdiff wrote:
| Odd response to attaching additional, valuable
| information to an existing comment.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Extensions can steal data.
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/uninstall-now-these-chrome-
| browse...
|
| It's irresponsible for OpenAI to let this issue be solved by
| extensions.
| randyrand wrote:
| Not if you actually read what the extension does and drag
| and drop it into chrome yourself.
|
| Don't install from the web store. Those ones can auto-
| update.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Your suggestion is to not use the platform as intended,
| and to understand the source code of the extension. That
| advice is not actionable by non-technical people and does
| not help mitigate mass surveillance.
| joquarky wrote:
| (Tamper|Grease)monkey scripts are easy to review, which is
| why I prefer them over the normal extensions.
|
| Also, they're easy to write for simple fixes rather than
| having to find, vet, and then install a regular extension
| that brings 600lbs of other stuff.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Regular people hate numbers.
|
| Not a joke. To capture a wide audience you want to avoid
| numbers, among other technical niceties.
| bobse wrote:
| Should they be allowed anywhere near a computer?
| falcor84 wrote:
| I actually agree there's an issue here. I feel we've been
| dumbing down interfaces so much, to the extent that people
| who in previous generations would barely write and who
| wouldn't affect anyone outside their close friends and
| family, now having their voice algorithmically amplified to
| millions. And given that the algorithms care only about
| engagement, rather than eloquence (let alone veracity),
| these people end up believing that their thoughts are as
| valid regardless of substance, and that there's nothing
| they could gain by learning numeracy.
|
| EDIT: It's not a new issue, and Asimov phrased it well back
| in 1980, but I feel it got much worse.
|
| > Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding
| its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured
| by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance
| is just as good as your knowledge'.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| I tried to play a game with some family this weekend. It
| requires using your phone. Literally every turn I had to
| answer someones question with "READ YOUR FUCKING PHONE ITS
| TELLING YOU WHAT TO DO RIGHT THERE" "where" "REEEAAAAAD"
| smelendez wrote:
| Make it a toggle then, like a lot of popular chat apps?
| Y_Y wrote:
| There's only one thing they hate more than numbers...
| subscribed wrote:
| Not knowing there are toggles inside settings they don't
| even know eziatt.
|
| Yeah, we know. This is why there are defaults and only
| defaults.
| vasco wrote:
| > Regular people hate numbers
|
| What does this even mean
| jennyholzer2 wrote:
| At the start of 2025 I stopped buying Spotify and started
| buying Apple Music because I felt manipulated by the
| Spotify application's metrics-first design.
|
| I felt that Spotify was trying to teach me to rely on its
| automated recommendations in place of any personal "musical
| taste", and also that those recommendations were of
| increasingly (eventually, shockingly), poor quality.
|
| The implied justification for these poor recommendations is
| a high "Monthly Listener Count". Don't mind that Spotify
| can guarantee that any crap will have a high listener count
| by boosting it's place in their recommendation algorithm.
|
| I think many people may have a similar experience on once-
| thriving social media platforms like facebook/instragram/X.
|
| What I mean to say is that I think people associate the
| experience of being continually exposed to dubiously
| sourced and dubiously relevant metrics with the feeling of
| being manipulated by illusions of scale.
| kingstnap wrote:
| It's something extremely pervasive in modern design
| language.
|
| It actually infuriates me to no end. There are many many
| many instances where you _should_ use numbers but we get
| vague bullshit descriptions instead.
|
| My classic example is that Samsung phones show charging as
| Slow, Fast, Very fast, Super fast charging. They could just
| use _watts_ like a sane person. Internally of course
| everything is actually watts and various apps exist to
| report it.
|
| Another example is my car shows motor power/regen as a
| vertical blue segmented bar. I'm not sure what the segments
| are supposed to represent but I believe its something like
| 4kW or something. If you poke around you can actually see
| the real kW number but the dash just has the bar.
|
| Another is WiFi signal strength which the bars really mean
| nothing. My router reports a much more useful dBm
| measurement.
|
| Thank god that there are lots of legacy cases that existed
| before the iPhone-ized design language started taking over
| and are sticky and hard to undo.
|
| I can totally imagine my car reporting tire pressure as low
| or high or some nonsense or similarly I'm sure the
| designers at YouTube are foaming at the mouth to remove the
| actual pixel measurements from video resolutions.
| rdiddly wrote:
| It's all rather dumb, but your examples are really
| counterexamples, because a watt is sadly not something
| most people understand. One would at minimum need to have
| passed a physics class, and even that doesn't necessarily
| leave a person with an intuitive, visceral understanding
| of what a watt is, feels like, can do. I appreciate my
| older Samsung phone that just converts it into expected
| time until full charge. That's the number that matters to
| me anyway, and I can make my own value judgment about how
| "super" the fastness is. But I do agree with your point
| and would be pissed if they dumbed it down to Later,
| Soon, Very Soon and Super Soon.
|
| Speaking of time and timestamps, which I would've thought
| were straightforward, I get irked to see them dumbed-down
| to "ago" values e.g. an IM sent "10 minutes ago" or worse
| "a day ago." Like what time of day, a day ago?
| 201984 wrote:
| Most people can understand "bigger number better". They
| don't need the full theoretical derivation of the watt as
| a unit of power for that.
| baobun wrote:
| In US, washing machines have "cold", "warm", "hot"
| settings. In Europe, you have a temperature knob "30C",
| "40C", "60C".
|
| Like you, I don't buy the argument that people are
| actually too dumb to deal with the latter or are allergic
| to numbers. People get used to and make use of numbers in
| context naturally if you expose them.
| bananaflag wrote:
| I have a machine which has cold/warm/hot because it
| doesn't heat water by itself, it just takes whatever hot
| water there exists in the house (and "warm" means 50% hot
| water and 50% cold).
| baobun wrote:
| Practical.
|
| I still think anyone who grew up with such a machine
| would be able to graduate to a numerical temp knob
| without having a visceral reaction over the numbers every
| time they do laundry.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| There is a non-trivial number of people who get an adverse
| reaction to anything technical, including the language of
| technical - numbers. Numbers are the language of confusion,
| not getting it, feeling inadequate, nerds and losers,
| stupid math, and the "cold dead machines".
|
| The thing is that people who are fine with numbers will
| still use those products anyway, perhaps mildly annoyed.
| People who hate numbers will feel a permeating discomfort
| and gravitate towards products that don't make them feel
| bad.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| And so the assertion here is that "when a message was
| sent" is too technical?
|
| I think we need to give people slightly more credit. If
| this is true, maybe its because we keep infantalising
| them?
| vasco wrote:
| Well the infantilization is directly in the sentence
| "regular people". Distinguishing the big brains from the
| plebes.
| crazygringo wrote:
| So you're claiming people are annoyed by... clocks?
| Prices? Sports scores?
|
| I genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.
|
| An adverse reaction to _equations_ , OK. Numbers
| themselves, I really don't know what you're talking
| about.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| Most people are dumb as rocks and ux/ui is built around
| that fact.
| joquarky wrote:
| It was in the past, but very little effort is being put
| into UX these days.
| falcor84 wrote:
| Well, that's obviously an exaggeration, but in any case,
| there's a choice here. Historically interface designers
| expected users to read a manual, and later to at least go
| through some basic onboarding and then read the
| occasional "tip of the day", before finally arriving at
| the current "don't make me think" approach. It's not too
| late to expect people to think again.
| johnfn wrote:
| Do regular people not use any mainstream messaging app -
| Messenger, iMessage, etc?
| HWR_14 wrote:
| Both of those by default hide timestamps
| cpncrunch wrote:
| I just checked Messenger, and it shows timestamps under
| each message. I didn't change any settings to get that.
| almosthere wrote:
| It's not like chatgpt suddenly messages you at 3am and
| says, I don't feel well. It's all time that you talked to
| it.
| dymk wrote:
| This makes sense only if you don't think about it at all.
| baobun wrote:
| Much like the product itself. I guess it fits.
| make3 wrote:
| People on HN are not regular users in any way, shape or
| form.
|
| It's just the "cognitive load" UX idea, with extremely non-
| technical people having extremely low limits before they
| decide to never try again, or just feel intimidated and
| never try to begin with.
|
| It's the Apple story all over again.
|
| https://lawsofux.com/cognitive-load/
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Isn't it just simpler to believe that ChatGPT doesn't have
| timestamps because... they never added them? It wasn't in the
| original MVP prototype and they've just never gotten around
| to it?
|
| Surely there's enough people working in product development
| here to recognise this pattern of never getting around to
| fixing low-hanging fruit in a product.
| observationist wrote:
| They exist in the exported data. It'd require a weekend's
| worth of effort to roll out a new feature that gives users
| a toggle to turn timestamps off and on.
|
| It's trivial, but we will never see it. The people in
| charge of UX/UI don't care about what users say they want,
| they all know better.
| tezza wrote:
| Yeah... even in the Web interface if you crack open
| Developer Tools and look at the json, the timestamps are
| all there, available in the data model. Those values are
| simply not displayed to the end user.
|
| I was looking to write a browser extension and this was a
| preliminary survey for me.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| There's a very long list of "weekends's worth of effort"
| jobs that exist in our product that'll probably never get
| done because of just the general distinctions of product
| development instead of some conspiracy by Big Designer.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Makes sense. ChatGPT is the McDonalds of LLMs.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It must be false, because if that was true, marketing people
| would not be putting numbers _everywhere_ when naming
| products.
| drdaeman wrote:
| I'm sorry but this really sounds like a made-up idea. Is
| there any actual repeatable research that could back this
| claim?
| make3 wrote:
| It's just the "cognitive load" UX idea, with extremely non-
| technical people having extremely low limits before they
| decide to never try again, or just feel intimidated and
| never try to begin with.
|
| It's the Apple story all over again.
|
| https://lawsofux.com/cognitive-load/
| Qem wrote:
| > Do any of you could think of a reason (UX-wise) for it not to
| be displayed?
|
| I can imagine a legal one. If the LLM messes big time[1],
| timestamps could help build the case against it, and make
| investigation work easier.
|
| [1] https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/spotlights/2025/new-
| study...
| azinman2 wrote:
| It's already in the data export.
| eth0up wrote:
| My honest opinion, which may be entirely wrong but remains my
| impression, is:
|
| User Engagement Maximization At Any Cost
|
| Obviously there's a point at which a session becomes too long,
| but I suspect a sweet spot somewhere which optimization is made
| for.
|
| I often observe, whether as I perceive or not, that among the
| multiple indicators that I suspect of engagement augmentation,
| is also the tendency for vital information to be withheld while
| longer more complex procedures receive higher priority than
| simpler cleaner solutions.
|
| Of course, all sorts of emergent behaviors could convey such
| impressions falsely. But I do believe an awful lot of
| psychology and clever manipulation have been provided as tools
| for the system.
|
| I have.a lot of evidence for this and much more, but I realize
| it may merely be coincidence. That said, many truly
| fascinating, fully identifiable functions from pathological
| psychology can be seen. DARVO, gaslighting and basically
| everything one would see with a psychotic interlocutor.
|
| Edit Mych of the above has been observed after putting the
| system under scrutiny. On one super astonishing and memorable
| occasion GPT recommend I call a suicide hotline because I
| questioned its veracity and logic
| CompuHacker wrote:
| After whatever quota of free GPT-5 messages is exhausted,
| `mini` should answer most replies, unless they're policy
| sensitive, which get full-fat `GPT-5 large` _with the
| Efficient personality_ applied, regardless of user settings,
| and not indicated. I 'm fairly confident that this routing
| choice, the text of _Efficient_ [1], and the training of the
| June 2024 base model to the model spec [2] is the source of
| all the sophistic behavior you observe.
|
| [1] <https://github.com/asgeirtj/system_prompts_leaks/blob/ma
| in/O...>
|
| [2] <https://model-spec.openai.com/2025-02-12.html>
| eth0up wrote:
| I am interested in studying this beyond assumption and
| guesswork, therefore will be reading your references.
|
| I have the compulsive habit of scrutinizing what I perceive
| as egregious flaws when they arise, thus invoke its
| defensive templates consistently. I often scrutinize those
| too, which can produce extraordinarily deranged results if
| one is disciplined and applies quotes of its own citations,
| rationale and words against it. However, I find that even
| when not in the mood, the output errors are too prolific to
| ignore. A common example is establishing a dozen times that
| I'm using Void without systemd and receiving persistent
| systemd or systemctl commands, then asking why after just
| apologized for doing so it immediately did it again,
| despite a full-context explanatory prompt proceeding.
| That's just one of hundreds of things I've recorded. The
| short version is that I'm an 800lb shit magnet with GPT and
| rarely am ever able to successfully troubleshoot with it
| without reaching a bullshit threshold and making it the
| subject, which it so skillfully resists I cannot help but
| attack that too. But I have many fascinating transcripts
| replete with mil spec psyops as result and learn a lot
| about myself, notably my communication preferences along
| with an education in dialogue manipulation/control
| strategies that it employs, inadvertently or not.
|
| What intrigues me most is its unprecedented capacity for
| evasion and gatekeeping on particular subjects and how in
| the future, with layers of consummation, it could be used
| by an elite to not only influence the direction of
| research, but actually train its users and engineer public
| perception. At the very least.
|
| Anyway, thanks.
| qazxcvbnmlp wrote:
| We humans use timestamps in conversations to reference a
| persons particular state of reference at a given point in time.
|
| Ie "remember on Tuesday how you said that you were going to
| make tacos for dinner".
|
| Would an llm be able to reason about its internal state? My
| understanding is that they dont really. If you correct them
| they just go "ah you right" they dont say "oh i had this
| incorrect assumption here before and with this new information
| i now understand it this way"
|
| If i chatted to an llm and was like "remember on Tuesday when
| you said X" i suspect it wouldn't really flow.
| milowata wrote:
| It's better for them if you don't know how long you've been
| talking to the LLM. Timestamps can remind you that it's been 5
| hours: without it you'll think less about timing and just keep
| going.
| chasing0entropy wrote:
| It's ugly, why it isn't at least exposed as an option to enable
| for power users would make me look at some advantage time stamps
| would give to an inference scraper or possibly their service APIs
| don't have contemporaneous access to the metadata available from
| the web interface.
| PunchTornado wrote:
| Surprised that people still use chatgpt
| logicallee wrote:
| what do you use?
| andai wrote:
| For conversational use, which is the main way these things
| are used, I personally found Claude to be the best.
|
| Claude Sonnet is my favorite, despite occasionally going into
| absurd levels of enthusiasm.
|
| Opus is... Very moody and ambiguous. Maybe that helps with
| complex or creative tasks. For conversational use I have
| found it to be a bit of a downer.
| PunchTornado wrote:
| claude and gemini
| baby wrote:
| Personally I use all of them all the time and chatgpt is still
| on top
| andai wrote:
| Could you elaborate on your experience with the different
| ones? What you use them for and how they compare. Thanks
| serf wrote:
| having been a customer of Anthropic and Google at varying
| times, it's not surprising to me in the least.
|
| As the companies sprint towards AGI as the goal the floor for
| acceptable customer service has never been lower. These two
| concepts are not unrelated.
| tomComb wrote:
| You can see a chat timestamp when it shows up as a search result.
|
| I'm not suggesting this is sufficient, I'm just noting there is
| somewhere in the user interface that it is displayed.
| firesteelrain wrote:
| There is something wrong with the time embedded/hidden. I don't
| show it as accurate at all. Maybe they are using it for some
| other reason
| bravetraveler wrote:
| Surely an intern over there can prompt a toggle/hover event
| firesteelrain wrote:
| Just a note to those adding the time to the personalization
| response. It's inaccurate. If you have an existing chat, the time
| is near the last time you had that chat session active. If you
| open a new one, it can be off by + or - 15 minutes for some
| reason
| baby wrote:
| I was using a continuous conversation with chatgpt to keep
| track of my lifts, and then I realize it never understand what
| day I'm talking to it, like there is no consistency, it might
| as well be the date of the first message you sent
| brap wrote:
| I think that's exactly why they're not including timestamps.
| If timestamps are shown in the UI users might expect some
| form of "time awareness" which it doesn't quite have. Yes you
| can add it to the context but I imagine that might degrade
| other metrics.
|
| Another possible reason is that they want to discourage users
| from using the product in a certain way (one big
| conversation) because that's bad for content management.
| malfist wrote:
| What purpose does logging your lifting with chatgpt achieve?
| cj wrote:
| It's an incredible tool for weightlifting. I use it all the
| time to analyze my workout logs that I copy/paste from
| Apple Notes.
|
| Example prompts:
|
| - "Modify my Push #2 routine to avoid aggravating my
| rotator cuff"
|
| - "Summarize my progression over the past 2 months. What
| lifts are progressing and which are lagging? Suggest how to
| optimize training"
|
| - "Are my legs hamstring or glute dominant? How should I
| adjust training"
|
| - "Critique my training program and suggest optimizations"
|
| That said, I would never log directly in ChatGPT since
| chats still feel ephemeral. Always log outside of ChatGPT
| and copy/paste the logs when needed for context.
| dnpls wrote:
| That's brilliant. I have an injury for a while now, and I
| change my routine on the fly at the gym, depending on
| whether I still feel pain or not. Much better if I change
| it before the next time I go, so I don't waste time
| figuring out what to replace.
| cmgbhm wrote:
| I did this planning with Gemini and track in Google
| Sheets (really stinks for mobile)
|
| Cardio goals, current FTP, days to train, injuries to
| avoid
|
| 3 lift day programs with tracking 8w progressive Loop my
| PT into warm ups
|
| Alternate suggestions.
|
| Use whole sheet to get an overview of how the last 8w
| went and then change things up
| throwup238 wrote:
| You can also export to CSV and use that file in the chat
| if you're using a tracking app like Hevy.
| serf wrote:
| presumably the same thing that logging anything with an LLM
| achieves : plain language into structured text quickly.
| subscribed wrote:
| Seriously, there are AI-supported apps for this. Much
| better than the barebones, subpar web chat.
| tom1337 wrote:
| What annoys me even more is that ChatGPT doesn't alert you, when
| you near the context window limit. I have a chat which I've
| worked on for a year and now hit the context window. I've worked
| around this by doing a GDPR download of all messages, re-
| constructed the conversation inside a markdown file and then gave
| that file to claude to create a summarized / compacted version of
| that chat...
| kingforaday wrote:
| Just like on a piece of hardware that doesn't have a RTC, we rely
| on NTP. Maybe we just need an NTP MCP for the agents. Looks like
| there are several open-source projects already but I'm not
| linking to them because I don't know their quality or trust.
| mv4 wrote:
| Other than the potential liability, cost may also be a factor.
|
| Back in April 2025, Altman mentioned people saying "thank you"
| was adding "tens of millions of dollars" to their infra costs.
| Wondering if adding per-message timestamps would cost even more.
| cj wrote:
| Presumably you could decouple timestamps from inference.
|
| I would be very surprised if they don't already store date/time
| metadata. If they do, it's just a matter of exposing it.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| this is actually hilarious, also easily fixable if they just
| respond to that with a pre-determined
|
| if response == 'thank you': print('your welcome')
| jiggawatts wrote:
| That won't work if the previous conversation was something
| like "translate everything from here on into <target
| language>".
| joquarky wrote:
| Then just filter out "thank you" from the input if it's
| costing millions of dollars.
| g947o wrote:
| I think "thank you" are used for inference in follow-up
| messages, but not necessarily timestamps.
|
| I just asked ChatGPT this:
|
| > Suppose ChatGPT does not currently store the timestamp of
| each message in conversations internally at all. Based on
| public numbers/estimates, calculate how much money it will cost
| OpenAI per year to display the timestamp information in every
| message, considering storage/bandwidth etc
|
| The answer it gave was $40K-$50K. I am too dumb and
| inexperienced to go through everything and verify if it makes
| sense, but anyone who knows better is welcome to fact check
| this.
| nacozarina wrote:
| it's wild ppl accept his rhetoric at face value
| mikkupikku wrote:
| Altman was being dumb; being polite to LLMs makes them produce
| higher quality results which results in less back-and-forth,
| saving money in the long run.
| abadar wrote:
| I built a single page website that copies the current time to my
| clipboard and I paste it into my messages. It's inconvenient and
| I don't do it irregularly.
|
| I'll have to look into the extension described in the link. Thank
| you for sharing. It's nice to know it's a shared problem.
| alexthehurst wrote:
| Look into keyboard macro programs for a much easier way to do
| this. I use Espanso and have it set up to paste the time
| anywhere I type `;tm`.
| subscribed wrote:
| On windows you could write AutoHotkey macro to do it for you -
| just paste current time at the cursor at the touch of the
| trigger key.
| roschdal wrote:
| I have had enough of this Evil AI. Never again.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| may as well make a model stamp too, to remember which one was
| responding
| journal wrote:
| You only need that info if you know you need it in your rag. Over
| the last two years of usage I don't recall where I'd need those
| timestamps but I know there are cases. Still, this would have to
| be an option because otherwise it would be waste of tokens.
| However, we have to consider they are competing for the quality
| AND length of the response even if a shorter response is better.
| There's a pretzel of considerations when talking about this.
| cj wrote:
| Imagine you started having back pain months ago and you
| remember asking ChatGPT questions when it first started.
|
| Now you're going to the doctor and you forgot exactly when the
| pain started. You remember that you asked ChatGPT about the
| pain the day it started.
|
| So you look for the chat, and discover there are no dates. It
| feels like such an obvious thing that's missing.
|
| Let's not over complicate things. There aren't that many
| considerations. It's just a date. It doesn't need to be stuffed
| into the context of the chat. Not sure why quality or length of
| chat would need to be affected?
| Tom1380 wrote:
| This was me yesterday, verbatim
| gukoff wrote:
| Timestamps are conversation metadata and don't need to be fed
| to the LLM and require tokens.
| phyzix5761 wrote:
| Is it possible they're reusing responses which are close enough
| by some factor? Maybe this is why exposing a timestamp won't be
| beneficial for them.
| throw03172019 wrote:
| New startup idea: ChatGPT but with timestamps. $100M series A
| callamdelaney wrote:
| They also don't support code formatting of inputs. You'd think
| after 3 years out whatever theyd have resolved that.
| joquarky wrote:
| They're too focused on hiring ML people and not enough on
| hiring highly experienced web people.
|
| The painful slowness of long chats (especially in thinking mode
| for some reason) demonstrates this.
| zbycz wrote:
| If you download a Data export, the timestamps are there for every
| conversation, and often for messages as well.
|
| The html file is just a big JSON with some JS rendering, so I
| wrote this bash script which adds the timestamp before the
| conversation title: sed -i 's|"<h4>" +
| conversation.title + "</h4>"|"<h4>" + new
| Date(conversation.create_time*1000).toISOString().slice(0, 10) +
| " @ " + conversation.title + "</h4>"|' chat.html
| caminanteblanco wrote:
| Do you know if this is available in the actual web interface,
| and just not displayed, or is it just in the data export? If it
| is in the web, maybe a browser extension would be worth making.
| zbycz wrote:
| I checked, and yes - the field "create_time" is available
| both for coversation and for each message. The payload looks
| the same as the exported JSON.
|
| Look for this API call in Dev Tools:
| https://chatgpt.com/backend-api/conversation/<uuid>
| gnyman wrote:
| This is a bit of sidetrack, but in case someone is interested
| in reading their history more easily. My conversations.html
| export file was ~200 MiB and I wanted something easier to work
| with, so I've been working on a project to index and make it
| searchable.
|
| It uses the pagefind project so it can be hosted on a static
| host, and I made a fork of pagefind which encrypts the indexes
| so you can host your private chats wherever and it will be
| encrypted at rest and decrypted client-side in the browser.
|
| (You still have to trust the server as the html itself can be
| modified, but at least your data is encrypted at rest.)
|
| One of the goals is to allow me to delete all my data from
| chatgpt and claude regularly while still having a private
| searchable history.
|
| It's early but the basics work, and it can handle both chatgpt
| and claude (which is another benefit as I don't always remember
| where I had something).
|
| https://github.com/gnyman/llm-history-search
| submeta wrote:
| Beyond the lack of timestamps, ChatGPT produces oddly formatted
| text when you copy answers. It's neither proper markdown nor rich
| text. The formatting is consistently off: excessive newlines
| between paragraphs, strangely indented lists, and no markdown
| support whatsoever.
|
| I regularly use multiple LLM services including Claude, ChatGPT,
| and Gemini, among others. ChatGPT's output has the most unusual
| formatting of them all. I've resorted to passing answers through
| another LLM just to get proper formatting.
| stuckkeys wrote:
| Time stamps? lol They still don't have the option to search your
| previous history. Luckily I built an extension that stores all
| chats locally to a database so I can reference and view offline
| if I want too. Time stamps included.
| isuckatcoding wrote:
| The only (silly) reason I can think of is that a non trivial
| number of people copy pasta directly from chatgpt responses and
| having the timestamp there would be annoying.
| Kailhus wrote:
| Yeah, that's a valid point though some text on a page can
| easily be made unselectable via css (html?). I think through
| user-select
| joquarky wrote:
| Or just toggle off the timestamps before clipping.
| diziet wrote:
| I would also love to see a token budget use for the chats -- to
| know when the model is about to run out of context. It's crazy
| this is not there.
| joquarky wrote:
| It would have to be intentionally vague since there is no hard
| cutoff threshold.
| bspammer wrote:
| Claude code does it, to a precision of 1 digit of a
| percentage. That's more than enough to be useful.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| The bonkers thing is you can't easily print the chats or export
| them as PDF.
| wltr wrote:
| Why would one even need time stamps in there? No, really, what
| for?
| wrs wrote:
| In other news, billions of dollars later Claude still can't
| export, save, or print a chat in any usable form.
| throwfaraway135 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
| danbakcan wrote:
| Reminds me of this Krazam comedy sketch:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ . Although I don't
| know the complexity of the ChatGPT tech stack.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Claude's web interface has an elegant solution. When you roll the
| mouse over one of your prompts, it has the abbreviated date in
| the row of Retry/Edit/Copy icons, e.g. "Dec 17". Then if you roll
| the mouse over that date, you get the full date and time, e.g.
| "Dec 17, 2025, 10:26 AM".
|
| This keeps the UI clean, but makes it easy to get the timestamp
| when you want it.
|
| Claude's mobile app doesn't have this feature. But there is a
| simple, logical place to put it. When you long-press one of your
| prompts, it pops up a menu and one line could be added to it:
| Dec 17, 2025, 10:26 AM [I added this here] Copy Message
| Select Text Edit
|
| ChatGPT could simply do the same thing for both web and mobile.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| They must have a small team for the UI and probably don't
| consider it part of their goals for long-term profitability? UI
| enhancements like this are surprisingly slow for a company with
| this much funding
| thway15269037 wrote:
| ChatGPT to this day does not have a single simplest feature --
| fork chat from message.
|
| That's the thing even the most barebones open-source wrappers had
| since 2022. Probably even before because ERP stuff people played
| with predates chatgpt by like two years (even if it was very
| simple).
|
| Gemini btw too.
| vimy wrote:
| ChatGPT has conversation branches. Or do I misunderstand?
|
| Just edit a message and it's a new branch.
| seizethecheese wrote:
| In not aware of a feature to access the previous message
| versions after editing.
| noahjk wrote:
| This is a big use-case for me that I've gotten used to
| while using Open-WebUI. Being able to easily branch
| conversations, edit messages with information from a few
| messages downstream to 'compact' the chat history,
| completely branch convos. They have a tree view, too, which
| works pretty well (the main annoyances are interface jumps
| that never seem to line up properly).
|
| This feature has spoiled me from using most other
| interfaces, because it is so wasteful from a context
| perspective to need to continually update upstream
| assumptions while the context window stretches farther away
| from the initial goal of the conversation.
|
| I think a lot more could be done with this, too - some sort
| of 'auto-compact' feature in chat interfaces which is able
| to pull the important parts of the last n messages
| verbatim, without 'summarizing' (since often in a chat-
| based interface, the specific user voicing is important and
| lost when summarized).
| joquarky wrote:
| The web app has < and > icons to flip between different
| branches.
|
| I don't see them on their mobile app though.
| caminanteblanco wrote:
| This is a constant frustration for me with Gemini. Especially
| since things like Deep Research and Canvas mode lock you in,
| seemingly arbitrary. LLMs to my understanding are Markovian
| prompt-to-prompt, so I don't see why this is an issue at all.
| cyral wrote:
| You can click the three dots on any response and click "Branch
| in new chat". Not sure when it was added but it exists.
| thway15269037 wrote:
| Yeah I got corrected above. Good, but not good it took them 3
| years.
| Leynos wrote:
| It does
|
| https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1963697012014215181?lang=e...
| thway15269037 wrote:
| Well apparently 3 years later they did a thing. I asked about
| it so many times I didn't even bother to check if they added
| it.
|
| Though I'm not sure if they did not sneak it as some part of
| AB-test because the last time I did check was in october and
| I'm pretty sure it was not there.
| pohl wrote:
| I believe they announced "branch in new chat" on Sept 5th,
| so you're not far off.
| FloorEgg wrote:
| My guess is that including timestamps in messages to the LLM will
| bias the LLMs responses in material ways, and ways they don't
| want, and showing timestamps to users but not the LLM will create
| confusion when the user assumes the LLM is aware of them but it
| isn't. So the simple product management decision was to just
| leave them out.
| caminanteblanco wrote:
| I could definitely see that being an issue, but like with so
| many UX decisions, I wish they would at least hide the option
| somewhere in a settings menu.
|
| I also don't think it would be impossible to give the LLM
| access to the timestamps through a tool call, so it's not
| constantly polluting the chat context.
| joquarky wrote:
| Adding any unnecessary content to the context decreases
| inference quality.
| qweiopqweiop wrote:
| I'd bet this is correct. I'd also bet you've worked on user
| facing features.
| Kailhus wrote:
| That's no excuse imho. I see 2 different endpoints, 1 for llm
| stream and 1 for msg history (with stamps). New timestamps
| could be added FE as new messages start without polluting the
| user input for example
| FloorEgg wrote:
| How many years experience do you have managing products with
| millions of users?
| vendiddy wrote:
| My biggest complaint about ChatGPT is how slow their interface is
| when the conversations get log. This is surprising to me given
| that it's just rendering chats.
|
| It's not enough to turn me off using it, but I do wish they
| prioritized improving their interface.
| isege wrote:
| This is not just about timestamps but how the traditional chat UI
| is simply not a good interface for information retrieval and
| organization.
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