Growth Accounting Not Adding Up ("identified_only" related?)

[iamnafets]

Bug Description

Bug description

We recently changed the session identifiers for our app, which we feed into the posthog client as a distinct ID. We also set person_profiles: "identified_only", on the client. We were expecting to see a lot of new users as a result of getting brand new IDs, instead the growth accounting is showing the majority of our users are resurrecting (!?):

When I click to view the persons associated with each segment, I get conflicting information. While there are thousands of resurrecting users yesterday (the 14th), I only see 53 unique persons when I click. On the other hand and when I click the band for "new" users (substantially less), I see exactly the same number of person profiles.

There's potentially two bugs here:

1. The person profiles, when clicked, don't line up with the chart specifically for the resurrected category.
2. We should not have moved from majority new users to majority resurrected users by assigning new IDs.

How to reproduce

1. https://us.posthog.com/project/55874/insights/Dc9yaNgS/edit

Additional context

You have my permission to look at the referenced chart but please don't share any private information in this issue.

Debug info

- [X] PostHog Cloud, Debug information: 

Session: https://us.posthog.com/project/sTMFPsFhdP1Ssg/replay/019156b5-f4ad-7857-ab00-4d9707cd36ee?t=3691
Admin: http://go/adminOrgUS/0188c19e-3b1a-0000-6aa1-d006cbca5583 (project ID 55874)
Sentry: http://go/sentryUS/55874

- [ ] PostHog Hobby self-hosted with `docker compose`, version/commit: [please provide]
- [ ] PostHog self-hosted with Kubernetes (deprecated, see [`Sunsetting Kubernetes support`](https://posthog.com/blog/sunsetting-helm-support-posthog)), version/commit: [please provide]

[slshults]

ZD https://posthoghelp.zendesk.com/agent/tickets/16946

[iamnafets]

@slshults should I have access to this?

[slshults]

Hey @iamnafets , Yes, I'd intended to loop in your email address, but couldn't find it and then forgot to copy my reply from that ticket to hear so you could see it. Sorry about that. Here ya go: "Sorry about the trouble, thanks for opening the bug report. I'm escalating this ticket to our product analytics engineers for a closer look, so please bear with us while we investigate."

[kdawgwilk]

We are also seeing similar issues with posthog defaults when using identified_only it shows we only have 1-2 new users each week but we know for sure we have way more users that have never used our app before getting new accounts created and logging in for the first time. If i change the event to identify events it does show a lot more new users but then the numbers look off in different ways.

[iamnafets]

Any word on this @slshults ? This is basically broken for us.

[dominik-sfl]

Any news here? We are seeing the same issue, with just tons of resurrecting users and just very few new users, though we know that's not true.

[dewitters]

I also have the same problem. It even shows "resurrecting" for all users the first month I started tracking.