In Discourse, the user avatar doesn’t show any stats about the user:
In other BB software, you generally see stats like total post count, reputation, date joined, etc. I’m not sure any of that is helpful, but it’s ubiquitous. What’s the reason why Discourse doesn’t give any clue about the user in this way?
Click on the avatar… Ta Da!
That still only shows badges, not stats like total post count. Is there a particular reason Discourse departed from conventional BB software on this and also didn’t use reputation like StackOverflow?
Do a search. It is visual clutter a far as Discourse is concerned
Discourse is trying to focus on content and meaningful discussion, rather than showcasing stats and personal flair (signatures,postcount,reputation etc.)
The quality of discussions is Discourse’ core mission.
Everything else should either be supportive of the discussion, get out of the way, or be removed.
At least that is my understanding of the Discourse philosophy.
Here’s an entertaining topic on signatures:
And one regarding post counts:
This made me laugh 
It’s the dispensing with BB conventions that makes Discourse so appealing right now. I have some issues with it, but removing post counts and other cruft is not one of them!
I’m not attached to the conventions, but some of them might be useful, so I was just wondering if this was a conscious choice to reject this particular one.
This is exactly the discussion of the issue that I was looking for, thanks!