Why is attention-seeking — like using too many hashtags or @naming someone famous on Twitter — “uncool”? More broadly, why do we socially punish attention-seekers, even when they’re young?

For many years, I assumed it was because their unfortunate social clumsiness made plain a fact we’d all rather forget: that everyone seeks attention, approval, and promotion. In other words: they make obvious the desperate neediness of the human self.

But I now think there’s a valid reason we may have evolved a deep social instinct against attention-seeking, and it’s simply this: unchecked attention-seeking behavior by individuals creates problematic dynamics in communities. A community in which self-interested self-aggrandizement is permitted will cede its culture to the selfish, and other aims and values will be subordinated to the gaming of the social system. That is: at an aggregate level, attention-seeking makes values-based attention-allotment difficult, inefficient, or even impossible.

For communities online, this often occurs in the form of “SEO” or similar gaming strategies: whereas a community ideally wants its attention to be directed according to values it holds — e.g. some intellectual community wants to see the “best” articles on new literature, the “most engaging” gossip about cultural figures, and so on — attenton-seeking behavior makes use of means of directing attention in ways irrelevant to or even subversive of those values. If one searches for “tolstoy criticism” and receives spammy results, littered with posts hardly related to Tolstoy but trying to make us of his name, one falls back on other sorting methods: reading only those whose names we know or whose publications we trust, for example, which ensconces winners and is a true barrier to entry for new members of the community.

So the reason it’s “gross” or uncool or socially costly to tweet at famous people, self-link, use gratuitous hashtags of questionable relevance, and so on is not just that it reminds us all of our own manipulativeness (although that too); it’s also that in doing so, an individual thwarts the community’s attention-directing mechanisms and creates an environment in which only the loud, aggressive, and manipulative can be heard. And that’s bad for everyone, because we’re not usually trying to optimize for that; communities generally have other values they want to guide their attention.

Attention-seeking, like bullying, prioritizes the private satisfactions of the needy over the impartial attention-directing of the community. Online interactions are so gameable that the problem can get quite severe, which is why there is such intense disdain for self-promoters. It’s hard enough to find the signals within the noise online; when someone pays to promote their post into your feed, or rolls into a conversation between two famous people unknown to him, or disingenuously hashtags his tweeted link to his blog post, he is refusing to play by the attention-directing norms of the community, hoping to “jump the queue” as it were. I think we sense that this is somehow not only unfair — not everyone can or will self-promote — but also destructive, leading to spammier communities in which there’s even more noise, and so we have an emotional reaction to it: “Ugh, looks gross.”