You mentioned Hacker News in passing. HN has public profiles indeed, but most of them don't have much information. Either people don't want to fill them out or they don't care to, possibly because they just want to do other things on HN (like post comments or upvote articles and comments.) The way public profiles work vary from service to service, as does people's expectations regarding those profiles. From what I've read, it sounds like public profiles haven't been Triplebytes focus, but users are now upset that they're being brought into focus or given more exposure than they ever expected before (assuming people are correct in the fears they've been expressing here.)