Also less people just caring about anything that isn't the normal open web. Have to install something? Nope, no way. Unless some very dramatic and visible changes take place in our society (or big companies with too much power step in and make the choice for the average user), darknets are doomed to be a tiny tiny niche.
Right now tor stats says there are between 2M and 2.5M users.. and if you discount everyone who's just using it to hide their IP / piracy / working around geo blocks, the potential audience for content hosted as a hidden service is absolutely tiny.
I also think that if tor or any such system got really big among normies, governments would start cracking down. Right now it's probably just a convenient tool for hosting honey pots and keeping an eye on the few people that use it.
Every once in a while I think about hosting a blog or a forum on tor but then I get the vibe that I'd have about as many readers as I would if I just wrote my thoughts on toilet paper before flushing.
My experience convinced me that any network that advertises itself as anonymous and is actually anonymous will swiftly be filled with deviant material. That will be my litmus test for anonymous networks going forward.
As more and more stuff disappears from the clear web, I assumed more people would realize that .onion sites don’t have to be a wasteland of largely spooky scams.
But if anything the quality of hidden services seems to have declined in recent years. I’m guessing it’s a mix of darknet FUD combined with less and less people knowing how to host a website without using an easy to deploy service