- 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
- 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.
by Valid3840
7 subcomments
- 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?
by thway15269037
4 subcomments
- 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.
by firesteelrain
1 subcomments
- 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
by Stratoscope
0 subcomment
- 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.
by realitydrift
0 subcomment
- The lack of visible timestamps feels small, but it actually creates a subtle fidelity problem. Conversations imply continuity that may not exist. Minutes, hours, or days collapse into the same narrative flow.
When you remove temporal markers, you increase cognitive smoothing and post-hoc rationalization. That’s fine for casual chat, but risky for long-running, reflective, or sensitive threads where timing is part of the meaning.
It’s a minor UI omission with outsized effects on context integrity. In systems that increasingly shape how people think, temporal grounding shouldn’t be optional or hidden in the DOM.
- 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.
by throw03172019
0 subcomment
- New startup idea: ChatGPT but with timestamps. $100M series A
- 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.
by romperstomper
0 subcomment
- I wish ChatGPT also had collapsable answers. Now the answers are quite long in most of cases and the whole threads become inconvenient to scroll.
by bravetraveler
0 subcomment
- Surely an intern over there can prompt a toggle/hover event
by isuckatcoding
1 subcomments
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- This is not just about timestamps but how the traditional chat UI is simply not a good interface for information retrieval and organization.
by throwfaraway135
0 subcomment
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
by phyzix5761
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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.
by callamdelaney
1 subcomments
- They also don’t support code formatting of inputs. You’d think after 3 years out whatever theyd have resolved that.
by baggy_trough
0 subcomment
- The bonkers thing is you can't easily print the chats or export them as PDF.
- 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.
by chasing0entropy
0 subcomment
- 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.
by kingforaday
0 subcomment
- 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.
- 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.
by micromacrofoot
0 subcomment
- 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
by stainablesteel
0 subcomment
- may as well make a model stamp too, to remember which one was responding
- 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.
- In other news, billions of dollars later Claude still can’t export, save, or print a chat in any usable form.
- 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...
- [dead]
by itwillnotbeasy
0 subcomment
- But it still better than Gemini! They haven't figured how to put a chat name into webpage title. /s
- I have had enough of this Evil AI. Never again.
- Why would one even need time stamps in there? No, really, what for?
by PunchTornado
4 subcomments
- Surprised that people still use chatgpt
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