As of writing, the number of Tor routers is in the low thousands and of course only a minority of those are exit nodes. Technically savvy people like the HN readership (who also often have a strong online civil rights interest) make pretty good candidates for helping the network out via running a Tor relay!
One of the issues with total Tor anonymity is that yes, the "bad guys" will almost certainly come. Because they can.
I am not saying that banning Tor outright is the best thing sites like HN would do, but seeing the ratio of regular Tor trafic vs. spammy Tor trafic on much smaller site myself, I can't blame them; almost anything that comes from Tor is spam.
Sad reality.
Yes, and they use the rest of the internet, too. Maybe we should ban everything.
P(spammer|non-tor) is quite low (there are not that much spammers), while P(spammer|tor) is almost one (almost everyone coming from Tor is a spammer).
I don't mean only for browsing the web. I mean it's time to have services in Tor:
- We need a Youtube in Tor that won't censor a video because it's an unauthorized remix of some other music videos.
- We need a Twitter in Tor where users don't get subpoenaed.
- We need a Facebook in Tor where I can use a pseudonym if I want to.
- We need a Gmail in Tor where messages won't be so easily eavesdropped by Governments.
- We need services in Tor that won't need to fear patent trolls.
PG, please unblock Tor for HN.