posted on Dec, 18 2007 @ 12:48 PM
As a newcomer to ATS I obviously can't speak to what it might've been like back in 2003-2004 but for the month that I have been reading ATS I would
have to say that there is a pretty low signal/noise ratio. While there is some interesting stuff to be found you've really got to wade through an
awful lot of silliness in order to find it.
Darkside -- I've been watching your discussion with the individual who, by all appearances, seems to be a highschooler who failed physics yet deems
himself to be the next Steven Hawking. These are the sorts of people that one saw on Usenet all the time. And since Usenet seems to be in the midst
of its death throes as these web forums are taking its place, all of these Usenet "kooks" are migrating to the forums.
Call me old fashioned, but I think that I preferred good old Usenet. Yeah, it's not as slick, you don't have avatars and all of the other
bells-and-whistles, but at the same time, on Usenet the "kooks" don't get points when someone replies to their inanities and if you just don't
want to see the thread any longer you had the good old "kill filter".
I'm really not at all sure what could be done on ATS to alleviate this situation. I've seen a thread or two about instituting a "negative
flag/star system" but I think that would be fraught with a whole sack full of its own problems. Quite possibly the only solution would be to charge
some kind of a subscription fee and put together a crack squad of moderators with the authority to determine when a person and/or topic is pure
nonsense and then close the thread. But I wouldn't imagine that either the ATS "3 amigos" nor the ATS members would be particularly amenable to
that.
So for now, I guess we just keep those hip-waders close at hand and continue wading.