Can you say the same thing about electricity?
Again, I'm not saying that Tor should be shut down, it's just unsettling to work on something that the majority of its usage is "bad".
They all have legitimate use cases for it.
And nobody has any idea what "most" (according to which metric anyway? Bandwidth, number of connections?) of TOR usage is for.
There was an interesting talk at fosdem a few years back about the network and its users https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/tor_project/
Every time I have needed to bypass a stupid local filter to read one of my favorite news sources (torrentfreak.com). Every time I've wanted to see what my website/project looks like to people from a variety of geographically different IP addresses.
Personally, I have a suspicion, that despite my love of freedom, Tor usage is probably primarily paranoid people and drugs, and a small percentage facilities anonymous exploitation of children in a way that no other technology can. I would love to be proved wrong and see some facts that Tor is actually a net good for the world.
Also one thing I've noticed is that the majority of good use cases for Tor you can achieve with just the Tor browser, whereas the majority of bad use cases you need Tor hidden services. E.g. as a journalist you can still use Tor browser to talk to your sources anonymously. But try hosting a drugs website or child porn on the clear net: you need Tor hidden services for that. Basically you'd only really use hidden services if you want to host content that is banned in every country, e.g. pedophilia or drug network. Whereas if you're a freedom fighter, why not use Tor to connect to a Wordpress website hosted in a country that's sympathetic to your cause? I just don't see a use case for hidden services. Yes, it is less trust in a central provider, but at what cost? You can also just move hosting countries. "At what cost" goes back to the first two questions and it would be interesting to know how we all feel about it.
The discussion turned around "Tor is used a lot to buy drugs, which is bad". At least that's how I interpreted this part of your comment:
> Personally, I have a suspicion, that despite my love of freedom, Tor usage is probably primarily paranoid people and drugs, and a small percentage facilities anonymous exploitation of children in a way that no other technology can. I would love to be proved wrong and see some facts that Tor is actually a net good for the world.
You didn't directly said that buying drugs on Tor is bad, that's my assumption, but I think that it's a fair assumption considering what you wrote. So my point was a refutation that Tor being used to buy drugs is necessarly a bad thing.
> Are we arguing about the fundamental facts of how Tor is used, or the fundamental morals we should have?
I think both are important if you want to determine whether Tor is a net plus or minus. I don't have any statistics to contribute and don't want to pretend that I have any. I think that if you take a point of view close to "drugs users will buy drugs anyway" and "drugs users shouldn't be exposed to more dangers just because they want to buy drugs", drugs on Tor can be seen as a positive. Of course you're free to disagree on those two views.
The reason I said it was moving the goalposts is because the initial arguments implicitly assumed drug markets were bad and only listed reasons “Union workers , journalists, security researchers, IT managers, lawyers, and judges and prosecutors” (really curious how some of those really need Tor by the way), but I appreciate you’re a different person so I shouldn’t have said that. The pros and cons of drug markets is a difficult debate. Regardless, I do think a lot of support (and criticism) for Tor is ideologically driven and no amount of statistics about drugs or child porn will change some people’s minds because they simply ideologically like (or hate) the concept at a fundamental level. I suppose it’s the same for all political issues?
These things are the most newsworthy which is why you hear about them most often. Don't conflate "most newsworthy" with the "most common" use case for Tor.
His analogy is spot on.