To get to the meat of it, it's probably not intentional, and it's probably not to show off. The fact of the matter remains that semantic information is linked to a hashtag on Twitter (as well as hubski!) and that it will have a profound affect on the way this site is handled in the future. It is fascinating to watch. The main points to refer to with regard to the ambient affiliation article are Fig. 3, Fig. 6, and references to logogenisis. On Hubski however there have been few times I could ever call someone out for tagging just to draw attention for shares or something-- probably because at least in my opinion it isn't such a big deal for someone to show off how many shares they got on a post.
well I was gonna give up at first but now I think I actually get it. When you mention that this ambient affiliation is an entirely new cultural process I guess you're absolutely right. At first I was thinking it'd be like writing a journal or book that strategically fits wider/multiple categorizations, in order to grasp the widest possible audience searching through those different shelves in a library. But this is totally different in that it's much more specific and the tags are key to the actual expression of the tweets. On a more irrelevant note, to be honest I'm so awed by behavioral analysis like this, but there's a part of me that sorta winces at the thought of deconstructing behavior; if anything's gonna make you self conscious then god damn that'll do it. In the end things like ambient affiliation sort of grew naturally didn't they? Just a product of human communication, interaction, and development. It seems like we're uncovering a big conspiracy in human nature trying to break everything down like that :D