Requiring my phone number does not respect my privacy. Reddit users can create as many identities as they wish.

oh wow are we now in the "finding information is bad actually" phase of the internet?

Mastodon believes this and willfully denies search functionality. Tech built to search Mastodon (https://fedsearch.io/) was aggressively decried as violating privacy and such.

So yes, there is certainly at least a vocal subset of people who believe that "finding information is bad actually" and deliberately building tech along those lines.