The charitable explanation: in the course of growing the business, Mahalo discovered that the tools they had created to support the "quality pages written by humans" were sufficiently powerful that laying off most of the humans and transitioning the rest to a "We pay you with Mahalo Dollars, which are sort of like a real dollar except for the bit about being able to be spent on goods and services" model did not affect the business in the slightest. Accordingly, Mahalo pivoted away from the original vision in the direction that the actual results demonstrated was working.
The uncharitable explanation: "quality pages written by humans" is a bit of PR for Valley consumption (and, ahem, Googleplex consumption) designed to make Mahalo "too high profile to bounce out of the index like a black hat spam site."
The uncharitable explanation: "quality pages written by humans" is a bit of PR for Valley consumption (and, ahem, Googleplex consumption) designed to make Mahalo "too high profile to bounce out of the index like a black hat spam site."