Interesting question!
I have a bit of a love hate relationship with this forum - for weight loss support, it is ideal, and exactly what you need when you are trying to do that. But I am very much a warts and all poster, and I sometimes feel like I want to challenge someones posts and because everyone is so "nice" all the time, I dont feel like I can, so rather than say something, I just say nothing. I feel I have to sanitise my comments sometimes.
At the end of the day, it *IS* a weight loss support forum, and exists for that purpose. If we want to debate and exchange views, that may sometimes become heated, then I suppose we need to find another forum to do that.
As far as attention-seeking posts go, I like to see beyond the post, and try and understand the poster, and sometimes, people who come on and post stuff that seems to be attention seeking, well, I tend to assume that they are probably pretty unhappy on the inside, and maybe quite lonely and feel a bit invisible in their real lives, and so they post "attention seeking" comments to let out that extrovert side of them in what is probably the safest environment to do so. Only that can come across as false and not quite "real", because what we see is a facade of the real person, the persona they want us to see, as opposed to the real person behind the post.