[ocdtrekkie]

I edited the post because I hit a rate limit on HN. I don't like it either, but I have to choose my use of replies carefully.

The problem you miss is that people have different identities. And people want to interact with others, to communicate with people, through those identities. Locking up your kinks in a vault isn't really an option if you want to share them with a community of like-minded individuals. But just because you do, you don't necessarily want your family to be able to look them up on Google.

People have different even potentially public personas, that they still want to keep separate. Under a variety of names, I'm involved in a variety of different communities, some of which I don't really want people I know IRL to know about, some which I don't mind. But all of them are out there on the Internet, because that's how I interact with them.

Actually, apart from the Google-centric notion of it and the lack of multiple identities (exacerbated by Google's "real name policy", Google+ was probably the closest Google got to getting this right: I could put specify which Circles people belonged in, and share information with each independently.