[Twisol]

If you have an account on N different sites, and you want to let people identify you between each of those, linking directly requires (N-1) links per profile, or N*(N-1) links total. When you create a new profile elsewhere, you need to update your profile on each of the N original sites, plus add N links in your profile at the new site.

Or you could collect all of your identities into a Keybase profile, which all of your other profiles link to. That's a lot less to manage. Plus, proving your identity at some site (usually) has the byproduct of pointing back at your Keybase profile, so even if you come at this just from a "less work for me" angle, you're getting verifiability for free.

[WA]

Or you could collect all of your identities in one other central place (say your website or HN) and link to the central place from all other profiles. Because that is exactly the scenario you just mentioned. Having direct links to all other profiles isn't solved by keybase. The only thing it provides is a central place for profile links – and there are obviously other ways to achieve this.

[bloopernova]

Sure, but if you look at how Keybase is verifying the information and how it is presenting that trust to external users, I feel that the value they are providing has increased greatly over a static page listing social network IDs.

Take a look at https://keybase.io/anthonyclarka2/sigchain

You can see a whole bunch of extra crypto is being used to verify the information.