Are there any useful websites on the 'dark web'? I'm thinking of the kind of things we hundreds of millions use every day that are legal (social networks, email, youtube, etc.). If so why aren't more people using them? And if not that seems like the easiest way to change the image of the 'dark web' and bring more regular people on to it.
The person found a handful of thins like Facebook were available and some big journalistic organizations can be contacted that way. There were a number of indexes of known .onion URLs.
Most of the rest was hacker services for sale, scam sites, child porn, etc.
Outside of passing info to journalists (not much traffic) or talking where state censors couldn't find you in a repressed regeime... what would make 'the dark web' useful enough to normal people that it would get used in any sort of scale? There's an obvious advantage for criminals to use it but I don't see something to compel non-criminals. Thus it seems to have sort of naturally segregated into a mostly criminal thing.
If governments or powerful corporations start to engage in more censorship in the future, then more people will have a motivation to protect themselves against censorship.
If you don't care about the feature of censorship resistence, perhaps because nothing that you do is controversial or interesting enough to be in danger of being censored, then you obviously wouldn't have much reason to use tor.
If, on the other hand, governments and/or powerful corporations engage in more censorship in the future, then more people will have a reason to use a censorship resistant service.
There's onionnail[0] whose author I can personally vouch for from the point of view of his intentions. About the security of it all, I have to admit I'm not qualified to judge.
Silk Road ;-)