Need we wade through the bad to find the good?

My personal opinion is that the quality of material supplied to ATS has dropped such that clicking on a large percentage of especially UFO and alien threads is a waste of time and eyeballs.

To improve the content and give credit to the real users of ATS that help weed out the chaff anyway, I suggest that the management augment the Firehose listings with two more statistical factors other than simply noting the number of "replies" to the thread.

Simply add to the area where a thread can be flagged the ability to "thumbs down" it within the same feature.
Then relay those icons and numbers to the Firehose page.

That will solve much of the trash flowing into ATS these days before it even gets into the innards. And it will give a clue to the unsuspecting searcher what they may want to avoid of that which does get in.

That would not be censorship by ATS, nor could it be said, censorship directly by the members. We see such determinations made this way on the internet with everything from movies to public figures.