Every time I read a post like this I'm inclined to post Doctorow's Metacrap piece in response. You got there ahead of me. His reasoning is still valid and continues to make sense to me. Where do you think he's "comically wrong"?
Link counting being reliable for search. After going through people's not-so-noble qualities and how they make the semantic web impossible, he declares counting links as an exception. It was to a comical degree not an exception.
I think that the jury is still out on that one. Human judgement is too often colored by human incentives. I still think there's an opportunity for mechanical assessments of quality and pedigree to excel, and exceed what humans can do; at least, at scale. But, it'll always be an arms race and I'm not convinced that bots are in it except in the sense of lying through metadata, which brings us back to the assessment of quality and pedigree - right/wrong, good/bad, relevant/garbage.
