Sounds like a feature more than an issue.
As it is now, only serious criminals can manage it.
Manage what? Not having to use Google and Facebook?
Basically, you need clean IPs and mobile accounts. Tor and VPN exits don't work so well. Creating your own VPN in a VPS sometimes works. But I gather that the pros use botnet slaves with genuine residential IPs.
And that reminds me. I recently tried to create a ProtonMail account via Tor. But they wouldn't activate it without mobile and credit/debit card numbers. Ironic, no? And yes, I do get that many jerks have misused ProtonMail accounts.
Edit: I take that back about Facebook. Via the onion, it just wanted an email address to authenticate. I'm impressed.
As someone who has run both an image board and a decent IRC server in the past, it’s a choice between heavily scrutinizing tor connections or banning them outright.
wx13p 7 hours ago [dead] [-]
It works.
But someone did a manual override.
I am impressed. HN does allow throwaway accounts, when necessary to post anonymously. And making that possible via Tor is admirable. There's certainly potential for abuse. I see occasional spam, and angry insults, but nowhere near as much as one might expect. Which suggests either that shadowbanning works well enough, or efficient moderation.
Using VPN services would be far more practical. Although some sites do discriminate against VPN users, it's much less common than for Tor users. The EU could of course block access to VPN servers, just as China has done. But some VPN services use obfsproxy, and so can piggyback on obfuscation efforts by the Tor Project.