It has basically all the drawbacks a VPN has (most sites will distrust you on recaptcha, speed bumps, sometimes a connection gets timed out or dropped) whilst having a shitton of latency on top of that because y'know, it's free. There's always been more people willing to use TOR than the server space needed to prevent overburdening the network (in no small part because running the server space needed usually incurs significant legal risks since congrats, you've now become a target for law enforcement to bust your door down and ask why an IP you own a machine on is being used to upload CP to the clearnet - few people want to deal with this scenario for blatantly obvious reasons).
This isn't really something you can fix, it's just kind of an inherent issue with the protocol.
What this graph doesn't really unveil but is so crucially important is that webpages have gotten a lot heavier over the years. In the past, you could visit most websites at a half-decent speed with a regular landline connection. Nowadays you need to download several megabytes of content before you can even load a page in properly.
It only does if you set it up as an exit node.
I recollect a case a few years ago, where they tracked a guy down on a campus through traffic analysis in a fairly quiet environment Torwise, and both endpoints were on the campus.
> I keep saying this, but...
Mine isn't redundant, note. Just because he keeps saying, doesn't mean he's posting about it on HN, and if he does doesn't mean he's doing so verbatim, which I showed.
I do believe that most people on HN qualify as "interesting" to these forces.
Just the fact you’re using it automatically makes you interesting and worthy of a closer look.
All well and good if you’re just maintaining a cookie recipe site on the dark web, but it’s rarely ever that, is it?