They don’t. They sell tools to governments and companies, that the clients use with their own data, that they already have. Palantir doesn’t do the spying or data harvesting, and they don’t have any data of their own, they develop and sell tools that clients use with whatever data the clients have.
They make the spy tools, they are not doing the spying.
I think “20 minutes ago” is a lot more useful than seeing the full date on every comment and having to do mental math. It does make it harder to see the precise date, but that’s a far less common use case, so the tradeoff goes towards making it more usable for the more common scenario. So I see that as the reason: it’s usually better. The full date is still available on hover, which seems reasonable to me.
I disagree with your premise that web developers “want to make it hard”, as that isn’t the motivation. The motivation is to make it easy to see when a comment was posted, which is far more useful as relative time. That it makes it harder to copy the full date is not the goal, but an unfortunate side-effect of the tooltip disappearing when you stop hovering over the relative time. Which I’m sure you could submit as an issue to the lemmy devs, because likely it just never came up, and isn’t some evil plot to “make it hard on purpose”.
Looking into git commits, the unselectable property was added by @dessalines@lemmy.ml, so maybe we can get an answer right from the source instead of guessing?
It’s interesting you say they “obscure it”, where in your example they went out of their way to make it possible to see the precise date and time when you hover over the relative time. They could easily not add the tooltip and yet they did.
Why is it not selectable? My guess is that most people would want to select the content of the comment but accidentally also select the time since it’s very close to it, so to make it easier to select just the content, they made the time unselectable. It’s a tradeoff but helps in more cases than it harms. Just a guess though.
AI slop