When I first see the numbers, I can’t believe my eyes. For example Epic Developer Community Forums actually has 4,862,548 users but Discourse Discover shows 33,000.
Later when I’m writing a bug report and switching between browser tabs, my mouse hovers the icon…
I will never know the number means signed-in users active in the past 30 days, not total users if I’m not lucky enough.
I am personally not a fan of showing a total user number, it’s not a meaningful value IMO. 3 million users accounts created, sure… but are they actively participating? The majority of that number, clearly not.
That said, you are right, the icon does not convey “active users in last 30 days” on its own. No one icon can… curious if you have any thoughts @awesomerobot
I agree. I have users who haven’t visited in 25 years. (But they could return at any time.)
I think if we change anything, we can maybe consider making that supporting information easier to discover — perhaps a more obvious 
trigger for the tooltip… but agree that it’s not critically important information at all. Our goal is to give people an idea of what level of activity to expect if they sign up today. If a million people signed up last year and never came back why would that be useful to me?
What the reason show total users? for me make sense when they are showing actives members
Look, I’ve a channel at Youtube with 17M subscribes but I had only 60K views per video for whole year, to me rentetions matters more
Beyond that, if Discovery shows just total users it will break the ranking dynamic
