In retrospect google since it's inception, when it was still good, google always actually relied on human curation. Primary component of pagerank were:
- "how much have people linked to this?"
- "how much have reliable sites linked to this?"
- "how good quality are pages from this site usually?"
(Which is still a way to get value out of google by adding "site:www.reliable-website.example" tags)
It was definitely a useful product, but ultimately it relies on human labor to surface quality results closer to the top.
Actually reading the python discussion boards, what's striking is the immense volume of chatter produced by Tim, always in couched in:
In his heart he must understand how bad he his, or he wouldn't couch his discourse in so much bad faith, and he wouldn't make so much of a stink out of making removing Python Fellow status more easy to remove.