[Cthulhu_]

Tor is used for shady practices, just like proxies of old. SE has a lot of measures in place already to prevent shady practices. If 90% of traffic from Tor exit nodes is shady, why shouldn't they block Tor entirely?

If you access any website through Tor (or proxies) you're already more suspicious than the average user. If enough people cause trouble through Tor exit node IPs, it's only natural they get blocked.

[jbentham]

Actually, there is no evidence that Tor is any shadier than the rest of the Internet, especially given that most attacks and vandalism originate from botnets and other compromised systems, not Tor.

Akamai published an analysis that affirms this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20170317110115/https://www.akama...

[harabat]

Great resource, a surprisingly clear and detailed introduction to the various attacks faced by websites!

The relevant part:

> "we concluded that approximately 1 in 380 http requests coming out of Tor is verified to be malicious, while only 1 in 11,500 http requests coming out of a non-Tor ip were verified to be malicious. In essence, an http request from a Tor ip is 30 times more likely to be a malicious attack than one that comes from a non-Tor ip."

[yanmaani]

Because 'shady' traffic does you more or less no harm, unless your web application executes arbitrary untrusted input?

For a serious site, the cost of allowing passive reading is going to be ~0.

[zxcvbn4038]

Pure propaganda. I used to work at a top five web site, Tor never caused us any problems, our problems were 1) hacked university accounts from eastern Europe 2) China 3) Russia 4) super-fans trying to download every video and picture of their favorite porn star at once.

We occasionally had people upload child porn, they did it over the public internet and not tor, our lead counsel was a former US district attorney, his hobby was doxing the uploaders and providing all the evidence and information to the authorities in a "ready to prosecute" package. I forget the exact number but I think he got almost a dozen people prosecuted and jailed.

[Scoundreller]

I think it’s more like Tor traffic is 99.9999% less profitable.

“Legit” Users likely block ads, are unlikely to enter their credit card numbers because of MITM shenanigans and it’s one of the few browsers that takes non-fingerprintability of its users seriously.