The main slogan of Google now sounds like: "make sites for real people". The one who gets it right, knows how to make good self-populating sites which will be ok with Google.
In the post-Panda era Google does not care too much about your content (how big your articles are, how many keywords there etc). The most important factor is your visitors' behavior. If they (the visitors) love your site (bounce rate, on site time, depth of browsing, % of bookmarkers, etc), then Google will automatically consider it "as made for real people" and course it won't remove it from the SERP's.
Thus the most important thing is to make the surfers stay at your site longer and come back again and again.
Just a year ago it was a common practice to order a bunch of "unique" but boring and useless articles from 3rd-world copywriters and post them to a poor-looking blog with some boring or even default design. Now this won't fly because such sort of site will have an off-scale bounce rate, and site will be automatically penalized by Google as a low quality one.
On the other hand, a well-designed self-populating site which syndicates quality and properly sorted content such as images (there are tons of legal sources), videos (even from popular tubes, sponsored XML feeds and other resources that allow embedding), online games etc will catch the surfers for a long time. And nobody will care if your content is "unique" or not. If the visitors love your site then it "made for the real people". Yes, it is that simple!
P.P.S. Adapt or die
