Do people really exist who give a fuck about what trophies someone has achieved? Do people really look into other peoples trophies and appreciate how awesome that person must be? Really? In reverse, do people really believe that anybody looks into their trophy lists?

Well okay. My very own gf is a trophy hunter. Whenever she plays a game she is going for 100%, and she will use guides to not miss relevant stuff. She goes for the first run with no guides and to just enjoy the experience, after that she will do a second run for trophies. Recently she did this with Beyond Two Souls. She didn't even like the game at all but still played several sections multiple times just to get those damn trophies. So who am I to talk bad about them, right?

Another example: We have a friend who likes to talk about how she enjoyed certain games (Ni No Kuni in particular) and how she became such a huge fan of them and so on. So my girl checked the trophies and it turns out that this friend only played the first chapter and then quit.

But 'd like to pick up your second example. If you are already talking with another person about a game then you could simply ask if s/he already finished it, no? Then you would know if you could talk spoilerfree or not.

I don't mind this sort of stuff for the most part, but I do mind them when they're used as replacements for the game actually rewarding you with something, thus artificially and superficially extending the playtime meaninglessly. Like the Firefly medals in The Last of Us, or the silver medals in Sonic 06, which serve no purpose but to give you a useless achievement/trophy; if they gave us stuff like say in The Last of Us, concept artwork or diary logs of the Firefly group, that'd be fine. But honestly, I'd much prefer proper in-game rewards, like a special item, weapon, armour, whatever, rather than to waste time trying to do some arbitrary task to get a digital medal when there's so many fantastic games to discover and play.

On Xbox One right on the home screen there's a monthly leaderboard of your friends and their Achievements. I often took pride in being first amongst all of my friends. I'd even play Telltale Games just to solidify my lead. 

Certain games used to (and maybe still do--i haven't seen it in a while) tell you in game how close you were to beating your friend's score. It'd say "KillerBlood07 killed 11 grunts with stealth. d21lewis killed 8"

I was often competing with my friends despite the fact that they never knew it. Xbox One compares tons of things per game. Hours played, miles driven, number of times you died, bullets fired, etc. 

*Edit* I also got a message from a friend of mine on PS4 laughing at my bronze trophies. 😢

Okay I din't know that. Thanks!

This gives some kind of competition.

I often look at my friends trophies, its cool to see how far they got in a game, makes for interesting discussions. For example I could see one of my best mates didn't finish God of War, despite him praising it. Was a good conversation starter. Plus some of my other friends like to compete against who has the most platinums, it's something i don't do anymore, but definitely very popular. 

This is cool, but it's well past time for Nintendo to introduce an achievements system. I can get why it didn't happen on the Wii, the Wii didn't have much of an online infrastructure. Heck, I can even kind of understand Nintendo still not going for it with Wii U. Maybe. But the Switch really should add an achievements system. It's been an industry standard feature since the late 2000s.

Seems like to those who dissed trophy things, "trophy hunter" doesn't exist? Also almost every single enthusiastic PlayStation player around me are that type of people who have average 20+ platinums. Can't really say achievement system is no important just because it doesn't exist on Nintendo system.

Achievement system also require players to explore as much as possible in the world that Devs put effort to create and may give players surprise like Easter eggs, it's not only about social and show off things, seriously, on PS4, the trophy pops up with the auto screenshots which can be then memories of the moment of achievement, just like a footprint of game journey. In such case, it's absolutely win-win situation for both players and Devs.

Nobody said others don't care, we were merely speaking about our personal opinions.  I personally think trophies are silly for a variety of reasons:

1) most trophies require going above and beyond in a game, it isn't like a Platinum is earned for beating a game, who is going to kill 1,000,000 enemies in Gears 2??

2) I don't feel the need to impress nor prove my videogame skills on the interwebz, so I don't get the point of trophies

3) I also don't look over my past 'achievements' as though I am turning pages in a family photo album, it just isn't that important

Nintendo has nothing to do with this.  My ps3, ps4, xbox, etc all have trophies...  and I turn off notifications because I simply don't care.  And again, others care, which is fine.  People are simply giving their personal opinion on trophies which we are entitled too.  I used to care, but realized I was playing games for the wrong reasons, to get some silly notification that doesn't serve a purpose.  Which (for me) was making games more a chore than fun, because I had to intentionally play a game not the way I wanted to in order to have fun, but in a way to get a meaningless trophy.  

And if we really want to singe out Nintendo and the importance of trophies/achievements...  I would argue clearly it isn't that important.  Look at Switch sales compared to the One...  the lack of an arbitrary award system doesn't seem to be hurting Nintendo at the moment, nor does it seem to be helping Microsoft.