The metacrap fallacy is "If everyone would simply put things into the right bucket with the right metadata this would work!"

The fallacy was defined by Cory Doctorow.

A seemingly reasonable assumption that is secretly impossible.

A smuggled infinity.

Everything downstream of that assumption is also impossible.

In fractally generated, natural systems, you hit a ceiling when trying to formally model them.

The volume is the value, the surface area is the cost.

Every new rule in the model is new surface area.

As you go deeper into the edge cases and fractal wrinkles, they get more and more expensive to formally capture and model, while the net value captured goes up much more slowly.

You end up with fundamentally more buckets than things to go into the buckets..

There are more ways to bucket a set of things than the things themselves.

This is a combinatorial explosion.

Imagine trying to add a feature to allow sharing with family members.

One team gets stuck down a rabbit hole of trying to capture the full semantics.

"How do I represent the constraint of 'Cousin Vinny is technically family but I wouldn't trust him to be alone with the silverware?'"

They are stuck in the metacrap fallacy.

Another team says, "we will simply not have that feature".

Or, "There is simply a list of accounts that users can control"

A radical simplification that can capture 80% of the problem, succinctly.

A "good enough" solution that requires a curatorial, subtractive authorial voice.