I'm curious what those toxic attitudes are. Surely the "we already invented it and you're reinventing it" can't be the only case.
I'm also curious if it's in an academia or in industry.
I shared the experience described by the grand parent. In particular I remember I had some argument on HN with a few people and the sheer amount of bad faith and technical inaccuracy thrown at me was jaw dropping. At this point I consider SW more a cult than a technology.
On the research side there are two kinds of research papers: the one that proposes an ontology for a domain, and the one that describes the conversion of an existing resource to RDF. I've never seen a paper where SW was used for something new and interesting and that would have been impossible without SW.
That being said, they are also both technical and conceptual pain points that are plaguing RDF. Basically the tech is trying to address too many things: both metadata and data, and every kind of data. "IRIs that can be URLs than can be sometimes dereferenced and sometimes not, but it's better if they are and then it's Linked Data" kind of thing makes it hard to assume (and thus build) anything.
So, RDF have been success in a few domains (biology) but in most case it doesn't offer a real competitive advantage over simpler and more expressive technologies such as graph databases.
PS: @zcw100 if you where to really write a book about semantic web, drop me a line please.
My take on the attitude in academia: Here we describe a set of algorithms that can solve a class of problems that previous algorithms can't. In the 60' someone published a solution to a problem we have improved upon with the novel innovation of called "hyperlinks". The technical, social and economical shortcomings of our solution are invalid because it is decentralised and therefor morally superior to the current offerings, used the world over, of industry practitioners who are only doing it for the money. More funding is needed for further research.
In general the decentralised fetishism isn't something that is big in academia (as in the academia that publishes paper). There's lots of issues in academia and even more with the semantic web, but fetishism of decentralisation isn't it.
