I don't want to see stuff for the sake of being nosey. I want to understand you better, and to have a better place to start the interview other than "how was your journey here today?"
For example, here on HN some people link their profiles to their real life identities and talk about stuff that they are working on with their startups or side projects or whatever.
You also get a lot of people like me who post under pseudonyms and just use HN as a platform for ranting about mostly trivial pedantic stuff as a bit of fun.
That doesn't mean I'm not working on stuff, it just means that the stuff I'm working on I don't really feel like talking about them on here. And I don't want some silly comment I write on here affect the stuff I am working on.
The way I write HN comments is completely different to the way I would write a publicity piece for something I was working from for example.
Of course if I was applying for a job I would provide as much info as possible on what I am working on, on my CV.
Basically a CV is a way of saying "here is everything I think is relevant". Perhaps that does give you a one sided view of somebody. On the other hand if your potential employer has access to everything you write online to your friends, then there is a strong incentive not to write anything online to them at all, lest some stupid comment you wrote at 3AM whilst drunk get taken out of context.
There is also the question of which profiles of somebodies you want to see? Maybe you want to see their HN profile, but what about their 4Chan or Reddit account? What about their online dating profile? What about the profile they set up some gay cruising website? Where do you draw the line?
A github profile is far more useful to me than a CV.
I've seen CVs that were absolutely dire, and so I was about to pass before I saw the github URL, I checked out their work and it was solid, so I wanted to talk to them.
If you don't want to share what you're doing, that's fine. You're just not going to get a job with me. You're not going to get a job at a lot of startups, as it happens.
That's your choice. I'm not forcing you into it, but I think you and your career would benefit if we moved as an industry to CV-less employment - github, HN, Twitter, whatever, are all far more helpful than knowing what grades you got at University, and 4 bullet-points covering several years of what you did working for a previous employer, for example.
Some additional ideas on disrupting tech recruiting Thread on HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535547 Blog http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2012/09/17/disrupt/
Case in point.
Out of people I know most of them keep their privacy settings pretty tight on things like facebook and twitter so that only their friends can see. So unless the recruiter has befriended them on these networks the recruiter wouldn't know anyway. If someone is using social networking sites to write poems to their other half I can understand they might find it somewhat creepy to give a recruiter or employer access to that.
The type of content they have on their twitter/FB is going to depend on what they use it for primarily and who their friends are.
I don't use FB but if I did I would mainly to communicate with people I know in real life, most of whom are not technical. So I wouldn't see any point in subjecting them to rants about Tomcat6 or whatever because they wouldn't understand or care.
Maybe if I lived in SV and all of my friends were developers at startups then I would post about this stuff, but I don't know what exactly that would signal?
If I want to discuss technical stuff I post on HN, if I wanted to write more thought out longform stuff I would create a blog which I would then add to my CV.