> "Do we throw out metadata, then? Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful (...) often a good means of making rough assumptions about the information that floats through the Internet"

Could it be that over-confidence in metadata was common around this time (turn of the millennium), then everyone realized the limitations of meta-data as illustrated in the article, subsequently dropping meta-data approaches altogether, forgetting that it is also useful.

So now we have a situation where the pendulum is now at the other extreme, where machine-generated classification barely intersects with human-generated meta-data at all.

The sweet spot seems to lie somewhere in the middle, as Aristotle used to say.