This is dismaying. I can sort of understand that the physicists want lots of filtering, but in the area I follow on Arxiv (machine learning), it seems to me as if there's a) little filtering and b) this works out great.<p>I have seen crank papers, but they are just ignored and quickly crowded out by papers people are actually interested in reading.<p>A while back they ran surveys on whether they should filter more. I and everyone I talked to said, don't worry about filtering, don't worry about prestige (yours or author's), just give a place to publish and good tools for searching/browsing (a la external sites like arxiv-sanity), and it's perfect.<p>But it didn't occur to me that attitudes might be very different in other fields.