This article seems poorly thought-out and borderline incoherent.

  Now Matt Cuts started to direct humans to the Google Spam 
  report page, “help us maintain the quality of Google search 
  results”. If this is not an admission that a Google bot sees no 
  difference between a splog and a blog than what is?

No, it looks pretty obviously like a way to train and tweak the pagerank algorithms. Why does it have to be something more than that?

   And it doesn’t look like the usability of the search results will 
   improve anytime soon, not after the massive amount of the social
   media clutter is now integrated into the pages

Why does the addition of new oneboxes conflict with result quality? These seem pretty orthogonal. (The author goes on to imply he thinks all oneboxes are spam, which just seems naive.)