Well he is expecting more chaos and uncontrolled user groups than what you see now - and see use of Scoble like characters as hints they are all about clicks/hype and so will fail. "noise from the masses" will overwhelm them, matter of time.

Related to the article and reasons you posted it I have no important comments :) - other than I agree with mahesh2k. DC probably belong to the group she refer to as LiveJournal sites. Strangely below the radar of typical community forces, happy and free. But this can quickly change. Find the thread about Mousers wet dreams of introducing advertisement while not change anything! I am sure it is possible but requires careful considerations. I remember some going NOOOO! If he actually did started with just handpicked affiliate deals, tiny weeny ads, this will be enough to get some out of control, perhaps leave. There will be the type of controversy she refer to. I think NOOOOs are highly influenced by the fact most sites/forums starting with revenue hunting go crazy and let not only site design but also content reflect marketing relationships. Like doing "reviews", not caring for where ads are placed and stuff. And they certainly do not ASK for permission either! Decrease of actual useful information/community values is expected, road of no return so NOOOO! :) Given the right/wrong circumstances DC will also face the music but more or less out of context to use her article as a roadmap to compare with.

Ooops, I have fixed links.

With all those pages to deal with they must use automated algorithms and so mistakes happen. What they do to manually fix errors is more interesting. We need a former employee to get chatty about how Google work internally with this. Not much valid info is available I think. Not easy to complain when no one has any fact based info. I am optimist and believe they just need to change priorities, get finger out.

Hmm, well so this page https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en&pli=1 which is identical to what the better security companies have will not trigger a reply? If I spend 1 hour diagnosing a site, suggesting it should be penalized I would be very annoyed if reply was not of some quality. They can disagree but I want a reply. They encourage you to help them so what choices to they have? Seems to me most Google complaints are hard to understand, when not in anti-Google mood, but if someone were to test this complaint system and prove it useless that would be cool to see in a headline ;)