The problem with TOR is CloudFlare and the likes. Many exit nodes are blocked, so you cannot reasonably get to a heap of sites. If I can't get to sites because they're blocked, then I'm not really on the internet.
Not TOR's fault, but it is something holding it back. Sadly.
Agree. Recently, my favorite childhood imageboard (711chan.net) came back online, and I was pleasantly surprised to see they offer the site via Tor, including using the Onion-Location header to make the browser aware of this fact.
Interestingly, they allow Tor users to post. It's an anonymous imageboard with no CAPTCHA, so I'm not sure how they intend to address spam this way.
It's an image board? I've been told that it's a really bad idea to allow image uploads from Tor at all, at least without the requirement of having an account that can be wiped out all at once. I think there was an idea to let Tor users pick from a standard palette of images, but be prevented from uploading their own.
Keep in mind that much of that is a constant struggle between moderating and Zersetzung. If somebody doesnt like free discourse, all they have to do is increase the moderation burden for such sites. Knowing full well, that the more rules you have and try to enforce, the more of an echochamber you become.
Still beats the toxic effects of curating identities in an social media echochamber. Dedicated boards also work as plumbing on chans.
edit: Totalitarians are also not shy about employing Zersetzung. For example, the CREST Research ("Mining the Chans") people are very open about attacking chans through AI generated garbage/extremism content to make them unusable. So chances are high that this is what you are seeing and reacting to.
Doesn't seem worse than Reddit or Facebook to me. Heck, even though it isn't as obvious the amount of negativity on HN about everything Chinese is basically the same racism, just written in ways to avoid getting removed.
Did you visit the site? They have multiple boards on the sidebar that are explicitly dedicated to racism. One of them is just named “[Nig]s”. There’s a picture in the sean one with a 1488 behind pixel black people.
What's the difference between being racist with the intent of offending ("triggering") people vs just being racist?
Isn't most racism done with the intent of making the target uncomfortable or offended (whether that be in small ways or all the way up to straight up murdering people)? Like isn't that the entire point of racism? The KKK wasn't burning crosses to be friendly.
I'm sure most KKK chapters were actually satirical, totally-not-racist, KKK chapters. It was that oddball 1 in a hundred chapter that crossed the line that gave the rest a bad name
Anonymity also makes it really easy to simulate something if you want to imply something about human nature. Thats luckily something that is fixable client side. Just be less gullible.
I think it’s more like that these boards attract a specific type of person, not people in general. People generally don’t like racists because they’re also generally awful people as well. That’s why they’re banned off of most of the internet and the real world.
The way online racists act is very different from general racism irl. It’s a much more hateful form and seems a bit more all over the place. They won’t just hate one ethnic group, they’ll hate everything and everyone that isn’t exactly like them.
Most people are either pleasant or neutral irl. There are no consequences for what you say online so people tend to be their worst on the internet. If people were generally awful, we wouldn't have any form of society anywhere in the world.
Yeah I block tor for account registrations for one of the worlds largest social media apps. It’s nearly all abuse. Though I let tor access if you already have an account.
The Tor developers were eager a few years ago to talk with people who were blocking Tor to see if they could help find alternatives. I realize you've probably thought about this a lot already, but have you ever discussed it with them? Alternatively, do you think you could explain more about the kinds of abuse that are typical when people sign up over Tor?
I realize that might come across as naive, because it's not as though they somehow know more about your abuse problems than you do, and it's also unlikely that they know something obscure about Tor that would turn out to be surprising and important for you. But they're certainly motivated to see if they can help people think of alternatives.
(I'm not actively involved with Tor right now, but I've been pretty close to the project in the past.)
Yes, but this article was very meticulous about only referring to the experience of using onion services. Native Tor. Kind of imagining a ubiquitous onion router over TLS and DNS, which is a bit disingenuous but accurate on the technical front.
40 years ago there were competing protocols to DNS, its just not common to think of it that way anymore.
Yea I mostly use LibreWolf now as Tor is too slow and too many services block it and just use it to read (many news sites have tor addresses now). But another reason to support the project is that a lot of the anti-fingerprinting innovations developed by the Tor project eventually makes their way to more usable browsers. The Tor project gets a large bit of funding to find and patch privacy holes in their Firefox-based browser ― the solutions they come up with can often be implemented in other Firefox browsers.
Cloudflare does not enforce tor blocking. Webmasters who use Cloudflare services, are making a choice to block tor. Cloudflare is just a tool, like iptables.
Perhaps I don't know how it works, but I would just imagine they would be, since Tor seems like it's mostly geared towards increasing availability of internet resources, and that aligns with Cloudfare.
Not TOR's fault, but it is something holding it back. Sadly.