The Times’ story on the NBC exclusive cites Twitter comments about the diaries — not their contents but NBC’s revealing them — as “pretty tacky that anon police are offering news orgs Philip Seymour Hoffman’s diary.” And so on: “simply nauseatingly intrusive” and “just despicable.”

The Times’ story itself attracted a comment in the same vein: “This is a ridiculous invasion of privacy ... he did not shoot up a school, murder his wife ... he killed himself, why do they need to know what’s in his diary? This is just ghoulish.”

Is it possible we’re getting glutted on other people’s — famous people’s — lives, and deciding to raise up walls again, at least to shield ourselves from unwanted information?

The amount of time devoted to unearthing and trafficking in celebrity gossip has grown in proportion to the places available to put it, mostly in social media. That chatter is cheap to collect and hugely profitable to purvey — compared to, say, serious reporting on how the U.S. government is handling the taxpayer-funded war in Afghanistan.

And it comes in several sizes and packages:

The complicit kind, in whch the celebrities, most of them reality-show cannon fodder, manufacture and market themselves as celebrities and violate their own privacy for a pretty penny. The “Housewives” franchise and the Kardashians come first to mind. Is there anything about themselves that they’re not willing to tell the world?

Then there’s the kind who feel some need to wrestle publicly with private demons, like Dylan and Mia Farrow and, by extension, Woody Allen. Hoffman had certainly talked about his addiction problems; perhaps it was part of the therapy to defeat them.

And there are celebs who want to be known by their work alone but who find that, paradoxically, that reluctance to “share” amps up the value of any nuggets the gossip miners can find about them.