As I mentioned here during the last boost in users (which was strangely initiated by multi-lingual blogspam), there's a sudden boost in sharing on my feed. I think this is what Hubski is all about - finding references to concepts and associating their user affiliation with it. In fact, there's a concept out there called ambient affiliation that I've studied quite extensively, and that I'm glad to see appear in the day-to-day.
It's nearing 3 AM here and I'm struggling to get what you're saying:
Are you referring to the tactic of sneaking in tagging another user in your post or comment, so that they are notified of your post, and thus more likely to share it and essentially draw more attention to your post? If so, I think there's a fine line between intentionally trying to do that and tagging someone where it matters. On Twitter I'm sure it's prevalent and intentionally used for attention frequently, a bit like using way too many hashtags on an instagram that aren't even relevant to the post. 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.
This is cool stuff, maybe I should just re-read in the morning. How did you end up digging deep on this subject, you mentioned studying it extensively?