[cgk]

"...lacking any ability to create a space where they could build and learn to code in private."

Correct, this is by design, the way to go for the private/no on-line community aspects would be to use the downloadable stand-alone Scratch editor. Based on the self-selecting group of users who agree to send back telemetry usage for the stand-alone editor, we believe that over half of all Scratch users are only using the stand-alone editor. Last year this was somewhere in the range of ~100-150 million individuals worldwide.

On the website, we regularly evaluate how we can downplay the worst aspects of a social network, such as, not showing the exact count of certain indicators of likes/stars/views in various areas of the site (e.g. showing 100+ vs 203, etc.)

https://scratch.mit.edu/download