The web has gone too commercial. People cares more about the Ad revenue than offering valuable content. Most sites don't freely share information withouth being filled with Ads/analytics, and most of the time that content is just a repost from elsewhere. From that perspective, linking things outside it's not a good thing to do, they're a way to "leak customers".
Indeed the commercialisation of the web is tawdry. I'm surrounded by a sea of bullshitters too. The scientific aspect of the web - it's honesty and naivity have been lost.
I still think there is room for the semantic web, to put right these wrongs - not sure about how you actually achieve that though.
I think a lot of is down to user-generated content powering large swathes of the web (the part people still visit). People still link to stuff all the time, but they do it in the context of larger websites / webapps, such as social media or news aggregators.
