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by ohmygodel 3740 days ago
I'm not sure what you're arguing any more. Your argument started as that only Silk Road was a "notable" onion service, which you appeared to define as having "publicity". Then the argument became the Facebook doesn't really need to run an onion service. Now the argument seems to that there may be some reasonable alternatives to running an onion service for some notable use cases and that few people use the other notable onion services (and I don't see how you can be so sure of that - I and many people I know use them not infrequently).

But I think your original point has been effectively rebutted: there are several notable onion services other than Silk Road, and some of these are quite beneficial.

1 comments

>Your argument started as that only Silk Road was a "notable" onion service

I never made such an argument, I said the dark net markets are as they're really the only sites receiving large amounts of .onion traffic. (Besides of course botnets)

> which you appeared to define as having "publicity".

We're talking about onionland in the media here, publicity seems like it would be one of the metrics that a journo would use when selecting notable examples of onion sites.

>Then the argument became the Facebook doesn't really need to run an onion service.

This seems to be a case of selective reading. I specifically stated,

>Facebook has no need to hide their origin servers, so their use of .onions is symbolic at best (besides as a TLS alternative) as any tor users would be better off browsing the clearnet version of the site.

I've highlighted the relevant part for you.

Lets say someone even manages to find the facebook onion address, which isn't a particularly easy task since seemingly the only part of their site where it's listed is the blog post mentioning it. For example https://www.facebook.com/help/ is of no use.

Now, lets say someone that's already using facebook over tor finds this address. Do you think they'll switch to it over facebook.com? I didn't, and I seriously doubt very many others did either. All it does is massively increase load times, modern browsers will already have FB certs pinned.

>But I think your original point has been effectively rebutted: there are several notable onion services other than Silk Road, and some of these are quite beneficial.

I'll agree on the other notable onion services, for example AlphaBay is far bigger and better than SR ever was.