I don’t think, I have ever actively used the topic map. For me, it is, unfortunately, one of the places where Discourse has a tendency towards visual clutter. This becomes especially prominent when threads become long and there are many participants in them (see e.g. screenshot from a Stay Forever community thread)
My main complaint is that, as already pointed out by @ondrej, there is a significant amount of redundant information there that is already presented in a less obtrusive way otherwise.
In addition, some elements also have unclear semantics. In particular:
- I assume the number of likes is the accumulated likes from all posts in the thread. However, it’s not clear to me how this information would be useful
- The is the option to show the top answers, but it is not quite clear what constitutes a top answer.
- There are sometimes links directly above the statistics block (two in the screenshot), but it’s not clear why they are there and what makes them important.
The one section that I do find moderately useful is the popular links section. I don’t think I have used this a lot, and I would prefer if this was something that is shown only on request also on desktop (where the section seems to be expanded by default), but in general here I see potential value.
If a redesign is in discussion, I would prefer if the current implementation gets replaced by a significantly more minimalistic design and that additional information is only shown on request.