Cory Doctorow, a blogger and digital rights activist, published an influential essay in 2001 that pointed out the many problems with depending on voluntarily supplied metadata. A world of "exhaustive, reliable" metadata would be wonderful, he argued, but such a world was "a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris, and hysterically inflated market opportunities."3 Doctorow had found himself in a series of debates over the Semantic Web at tech conferences and wanted to catalog the serious issues that the Semantic Web enthusiasts (Doctorow calls them "semweb hucksters") were overlooking.4 The essay, titled "Metacrap," identifies seven problems, among them the obvious fact that most web users were likely to provide either no metadata at all or else lots of misleading metadata meant to draw clicks.

In forums like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a huge amount of effort and discussion went into creating standards before there were any applications out there to standardize. And the standards that emerged from these "Talmudic debates" were so abstract that few of them ever saw widespread adoption. The few that did, like XML, were "uniformly scourges on the planet, offenses against hardworking programmers that have pushed out sensible formats (like JSON) in favor of overly-complicated hairballs with no basis in reality." The Semantic Web might have thrived if, like the original web, its standards were eagerly adopted by everyone. But that never happened because—as has been discussed on this blog before—the putative benefits of something like XML are not easy to sell to a programmer when the alternatives are both entirely sufficient and much easier to understand.