Re: [tor-talk] General questions about Tor proxy

[Akater <nuclearspace@xxxxxxxxx>]

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Thank you! That was one awesome response.

> What do you mean by alarm?

The answer is for you but it's also for community. Hopefully, the topic
is n00by enough to attract attention. If you feel it becomes too dull,
please take a look at the last paragraph, maybe you (or somebody else)
could answer the question there.

So, supposedly, Tor community wants Tor spreaded, at least in the
relays direction. (I believe the proper goal would be rather to
encourage common people to run exit nodes from home but that seems to
be to extremist an idea for the community.)

Anyway, growth is the goal because the very idea is basically âhiding
in the crowdâ. That means getting more users. The basic (the only?) way
to communicate with newcomers is through mailing lists, it appears.
Well, yes, I personally find it very alarming. I monitor some
communities whose products I'd love to see getting the popularity they
deserve (Tor, PGP, XMPP, GNU in general being some.) Let's call them
G-communities. (GNU captures a lot of the spirit, and it may also stand
for Geeks.)

G-communities look rather hostile. They are not aggressive, of course,
since it's all words and talking, but hostile and unfriendly they often
are. Which is weird: you answer, for example, is better than anything
I'd ever expected to get from a convenient support service.

I wonder if Tor (the company, or the community) even has a PR
department. Just some people who work, as volunteers, or not, on
promoting all the products and (which is also important) ideas behind
them? The public image is *awful:* it's âevilâ at worst, and âextremely
complexâ at best. I wonder how many people think it's just nothing but
a tool for direct violators of rights. It's the same with all
G-communities.

You suggested (or I jumped to a conclusion) that geeks just search for
zone of comfort, and that explains it. Well, it may be so but the fact
is: it doesn't help to grow network(s), like, /at all/. Geeks are
reasonable people first, but this behavior is irrational, childish and,
honestly, strikingly contrasting with their intelligence. How do they
think users will jump in if they use outdated media as a primary
communication channel? I had even seen someone here discouraging to
contribute to tor.stackexchange.com , on some irrational basis
(stackexchange beng for-profit, or something). StackExchange is one of
the best things happen to Internet (maybe also the only community in
the Internet where karma actually works) and also extremely helpful.
And free to enter, by the way, unlike quora.  Mailing lists are bad for
a multitude of reasons.

Having barriers for entry is generally OK. But I recently came to a
hypothesis that G-communities built the way they are for a simpler
reason: this process replicates the building of one particular
community lots of geeks observed forming in their lives: the school
community where bullies rule. For some of geeks, I speculate, this
could actually be the /only/ example. Only now they have a chance to do
it themselves in their own universe, or universes. They probably could
do better but, in case bullies' gangs were the only live examples ever,
a geek may had concluded, due to poor state of education in this
domain, that no other way exist.

But my main point is: there's nothing good about barriers, because it
prevents network from growing â which in the long run sinks the whole
thing (when lots of nodes go under control of a single entity, for
example). If you want to hide in the crowd you have to do at least some
interaction with the crowd. If you hate it so much, hire professionals,
or find volunteers, or students who might be interested in pratice. If
this part of work gets done too, who is involved? Do they post here?

Thank you if you read this all.
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