True, but as long as there are rules, somebody is going to find a loophole or a way to game the system. I'd personally be more concerned with Google improving their product or with society's increasing reliance on a single company's service and our unwillingness to consume information critically.

PBNs are garbagey, but trying to put them all down is unrealistic. And even if they could be stopped, it would only be a band aid fix, not addressing the real problems.

Seems like limiting their payment processing was a pretty effective step.

I disagree as the article clearly states they have other payment processors and were already moving away from PayPal.

So they say.

Spammers and their ilk, though, are not really famous for sticking to the truth.

Hundreds of sites have been brought down for hosting pirated movies thanks to laws against that, don't know why putting down PBns would be unrealistic.

ah yes, and the wide-reaching effects on piracy those have caused.

Nobody is gonna start torrenting spam web sites to access their useless content.

My guess is that in this case many of the sites copied content from other sites i.e. substantial copyright infringement. That is illegal.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

I don't see how that's relevant to this particular problem.

I read your comment as suggesting that certain actions aren't a good use of time or that they shouldn't be done because they don't fully solve the problem.

I understand the dissatisfaction with half-measures. But I would argue as long as the actions have a meaningful impact and there isn't a promising alternative, it is still worthwhile.

I get that, but you can waste all of your time baling out water, or you can plug the hole.

What's the difference between this and 1-click VPS with WordPress/etc preinstalled?

If you look at their other (past/sold) projects, it's part of a suite of software they've developed for "autoblogging", scraping, automatically reposting articles from prewritten databases, "enriching" them with random images, etc. It's very clear what industry they serve.