As someone who's spent a fair amount of time exploring the deeper corners of the internet, I've often found myself wondering about the dark web. Is it really a hotbed of illicit activity, or is it just a myth perpetuated by sensationalist media? I've heard stories of secret markets and forbidden knowledge, but I've also seen a lot of bullshit and hysteria. What's the truth about the dark web???? I install tor and I see nothing. I'm told to go on a search engine and search but I find nothing. I install i2p and I can't visit any websites after 2 hours. What the fuck is this? am I being filtered?

You've been shadowbanned from the Dark Web. Luckily for you, you've reached one of it's branches into the Clear Web. Just send an email requesting an unban to admin@cy-x.net and make sure to send both your name here and your PC name so he can find you in the system. (PC name is listed on windows now in the computer properties, I believe. Should be something like DESKTOP-XXXXXX) and he'll let you off for your first time. Most likely your computer fired off many requests at once because of a bad VPN or you tried to refresh too often one of the moderated pages and got banned.

The whole moral panic about "dark web" is 100% bullshit. And especially for one only reason: You can easily find or even see being shoved in your face all the time lots of illegal and fucked up shit at "clean web", including at big, mainstream social media and sites.

Also lots of this fucked up shit is easier to meet today at centralized interent than it was to meet at the old, decentralized internet. Take for example CP material and pedo creeps: In the old, decentralized internet in order to see CP you had to look at shady, illegal sites. And meeting pedos was a rarity and fortunately I've never met one back then. Now at the "clean", modern centralized internet? CP material are pedo creeps are fucking everywhere. Especially since the sites where they're often posted at are owned and run by pedo creeps, which is why they're tolerant with that shit while they ban you for exposing pedo creeps or just for saying the obvious fact that being a pedo is bad. It doesn't even helps the fact that society encourages and allows minors to open social media accounts and upload and share sexualized photos and videos of themselves or joining and using famous but questionable sites that are well known for being pedo paradises or playing online video games popular to kids that are infamous for being pedos paradises.

Are you one of those idiots who think a 17-year-old is basically a child?

being a pedo is not bad thoughbeit

And of course we have pedo apologists here too

yeah, nice argument against them, asshole. fortunately i expect people here to not be suckered in your ad hominem
i'll say it again: being a pedo isn't bad. at least until you have something to show for yourself

anyways, i'd like to know if there's more to the dark web as well. it is certainly illicit, though not as much as the clearweb nowadays, but it really doesn't present itself as an alternative internet due to it being hard to find personal pages and the like.

>being a pedo is not bad thoughbeit
>being a pedo isn't bad.
>at least until you have something to show for yourself

Explain.

it's simple. pedo is not a synonym for a rapist, chomo, rapist, predator or abuser
it is simply a sexual preference, which most people repress and lie to themselves about depending on what qualifies as a child to them. pedos are only 'dangerous' because this is not a society suited for them, nor for children
i felt like that should be extremely obvious if you've at least realized most mainstream/cattle opinions cannot be taken seriously anymore.

Fuck off with this shit. I didnt even bother to start banning you people until I found out that you fuckers are only coming on this site solely to post about your desire to fuck little children and links to CSAM. You're so incredibly obvious to the point that it's sickening.

This is a technology website at heart and a general discussion board at best.

Let it be known that nonproductive discussion in regards to pedophilia or CSAM will be fucking axed. This site is not a refuge for that and you already have Twitter and Discord.

They're just federal agents testing ur site bro!

>this fucking retard came on here along with his friends solely to talk about their desire to fuck little childreb
another normal day when you find out an admin is retarded and dishonest. we're in a technology forum and you except us to have friends lmfao, that wasn't even my first post
you're only freaking the fuck out about scam posts which EVERY forum and imageboard gets at some point, which is dealt with easily. and you're so incredibly stupid enough to think it's linked to me and not a fed, that's sickening

>You posted a total of three times
so it's convenient for you to forget dynamic ips exist now, huh? i don't have cancer inducing wifi on all day, so it's going to change
>No technology mentioned
my second post clearly went back on-topic about the dark web, and i was hoping someone would try to sway back on topic as well, though judging from the forum's overall behaviour, LMFAO
it was YOU who kept going with the off topic and wanting me to explain, and then you end up getting mad because of an obvious fed post. you're entirely to blame. AND you delete my post because it called out your retarded behaviour, which i've been observing you freak out about in your own irc and diggy's due to your paranoia

lolcat was right, i'll just post what you told him in his thread
>Unfortunate seeing this come from you as I thought you were generally an all 'round cool individual. Turns out you're stuck in the sheep mentality, absorbing ideas and biases from glancing at information and never truly looking into it. Not what I was expecting, but nothing was lost anyway.

@malformedjill
i am not the admin, but i will tell you this
a) there is no good reason to discuss csam, pedophilia or anything of the sort here. this is a technology forum
b) the guy that got holocausted got holocausted because he was discussing this sort of shit
c) the feds actively use csam to shut websites down.

why do you think he has a hair trigger in regards to this shit? feds and FAGMAN shut entire websites down with floods of cp when they do not comply.

>lolcat was right, i'll just post what you told him in his thread

Thank you for your wonderful feedback. I have on behalf of the site clarified our position on pedophilia and CSAM, and have added reason as to why we hold our position in question.
Please refer to the forum guidelines for more information in regards to this topic.

There are a few indexes on Tor and I2P that can help you get started.

Don't bother with Freenet unless you're interested in child porn and unwillingly using your internet connection as a botnet for sharing child porn with other users. I can't even say how much you should probably avoid Freenet. Federal agents have designed tools specifically to catch people who download or share illegal data on Freenet and it is inherently the most compromised thing as far as I know.

Not even Tor is this bad. At least I can use Tor and I2P s a shitty constantly changing proxy or intranet, but with Freenet, it's just P2P torrenting on crack laced with green rent.

It's amazing how easy life is when you don't want to fuck kids or animals or rape people.

> I've often found myself wondering about the dark web. Is it really a hotbed of illicit activity
The most common illicit activity on the darkweb is just scamming people. Imagine if you, guy posting on the Internet about not knowing about the darkweb but wanting to get into it went down to the shadiest docks in your city and screamined, "HEY! ARE THEY ANY CRIMINALS AROUND HERE THAT KNOW WHERE TO GET SOME HEROIN?!?" What do you think would happen? The darkweb isn't that different from that. So people like you who end up there thinking, "I'm an Internet-savvy guy, I want to see what it's all about," are such a danger to yourselves.

That isn't to say that there are not services on the dark web that are very cool services. But you can't just go on there searching for something and trusting whatever you land on as being anything other that an attempt to trick you.

Hopefully that will keep you out of trouble.

Like others said, there is a lot of illicit stuff going on but it's just like clearnet: it's all about where you look.

I just wanted to add that there is a lot of dark web that is very mundane. "Dark Web" (as in unindexed websites) sites are very common in academia, among other things like private corporate websites. I don't know how long that's been going on, but it's been around in academia for about a decade or so I guess based on this:

https://www.science.org/content/article/now-dark-web-has-research-papers-too