Ugh, I feel that this is one of the single poorest time-related pratices—from a UX perspective—short of not displaying the time at all. Please don’t follow this advice. It makes it really easy for the developer because there’s no need to deal with time zones and things like DST. However, showing a relative time in many situations is completely opaque. If something happened ‘14 hours ago’, did it happen at lunch time or 3 PM? A lot of times people want to know the time of day something happened, not just how long ago it occurred. Here you can do some arithmetic in your head to figure it out, but that’s a major annoyance. And once the relative time flips over to ‘X days ago’ the time information is completely lost. Similarly if it says ‘About 3 months ago’ it’s impossible to know if that means March 15 or April 1 or April 15 or anywhere in between, never mind the time of day. At the very least the full date and time should be displayed in a tooltip so that it’s available if needed. Ideally relative times shouldn’t be used alone except in situations where the relative time is absolutely, unarguably the only information that could ever need to be known.