The Darknet: Is the Government Destroying “the Wild West of the Internet?”
rollingstone.com
rollingstone.com
No third party SSO or share widgets and no need to upload a picture or give your legal name.
The userbase of each site is small enough to be an open free-form community and the volume of content (especially because things like reposts and social media don't really play) is pretty manageable and non-repetive!
Most sites are run by volunteers who aren't under the pressures of a VC round but instead just want to keep the community going. sizes are generally > 10 and < 1,000.
Worrying about convergence, SEO, "download our app/sign up for our email" dialogs, html5up pitch pages with marketing fluff, fade-to-black video ad overlays --- all that modern cruft is completely absent. It's so refreshing.
Tor's like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDxqfgIDvEY [CBC Archives: The Internet 1993].
To quote @ 2:10:
"One would think that if you're anonymous you can do anything you want. But people have their own sense, you know, of community and what we can do" he goes on... "If this is the only way they can talk to somebody, this is how they'll do it."
THAT web - the anti-establishment one - it's called Tor - a tool for the human spirit.
[0] https://gitweb.torproject.org/torspec.git/plain/dir-spec.txt
"Darknet" refers to "overlay networks that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, often using non-standard communications protocols and ports." Tor is an example of a darknet. There are many others (someone else mentioned SIPRnet as one).
"Dark Web" refers to websites on a darknet. Dark web, by definition, is part of the deep web. Tor hidden services are part of the dark web.
Rolling Stone is wrong when it says "The Darknet (sometimes called the Dark Web)" that's analogous to saying "The Internet (sometimes called the World Wide Web)."