Have you been to the Dark Side?

No, I would give it a go but can’t find the hidden entrance.

Anyone who says they haven’t been to the Internet’s dark side has never been Rick-Rolled

Yes.

I went immediately to a cat/human sex forum.

You can probably guess who I met there.

I have inquired about The Dark Web and determined that I do not have the computer savvy to visit there safely.

I wish I personally knew someone that uses it…I’d love to stop over for a peek.

I’d like to go. I haven’t been. Maybe one day.

Nope. Parts of it interest me, but for the most part, no fucking way. I have OCD and my empathy is off the charts. I don’t think I’d live through it if I attempted it on my own.

Can someone fill me in? I’m not naive but on this topic, I am clueless.

As far as I know we’re talking about the Dark web, @jca.

According to Wiki, drug trafficking constituted 15.4% of the traffic 1–15.
It’s a difficult place to find, and an even more difficult place to keep yourself (cyber-wise) safe.
I looked into it enough to know that I have no business there – literally and figuratively.

@jca It’s called the “dark web” because it’s hidden. “Normal” people don’t know how to access it. However, that’s probably a good thing, because you find the darkest parts of humanity there as well. The darkest parts of humanity exist on the normal web, but it’s much worse on the dark web. Drug trafficking, selling black market organs, prostitution, sex trafficking, pedophilia, etc. It’s rumored that certain government officials also use it to communicate (and spy).

The Deep Web: Several Magnitudes Larger than the Surface Internet

The Deep Web, Deep Net, Invisible Web, or Hidden Web are search terms referring to the content on the World Wide Web that is not indexed by standard search engines. Computer scientist Mike Bergman is credited with coining the term in 2000.

In the year 2000, Michael K. Bergman said how searching on the Internet can be compared to dragging a net across the surface of the ocean: a great deal may be caught in the net, but there is a wealth of information that is deep and therefore missed. Most of the web’s information is buried far down on sites, and standard search engines do not find it.

Traditional search engines cannot see or retrieve content in the deep web. The portion of the web that is indexed by standard search engines is known as the surface web. As of 2001, the deep web was several orders of magnitude larger than the surface web. An analogy of an iceberg has been used to represent the division between surface web and deep web respectively.

The Dark Web: A Small Part of the Deep Web

The Dark Web is the World Wide Web content that exists on Darknets, overlay networks which use the public Internet but which require specific software, configurations or authorization to access. The dark web forms a small part of the Deep Web, the part of the Web not indexed by search engines, although sometimes the term “deep web” is confusingly used to refer specifically to the dark web.

The Darknets which constitute the dark web include small, friend-to-friend peer-to-peer networks, as well as large, popular networks like Freenet, I2P, and Tor, operated by public organizations and individuals. Users of the dark web refer to the regular web as the Clearnet due to its unencrypted nature. The Tor dark web may be referred to as Onionland, a reference to the network’s name as “the onion router.”

—Wikipedia

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WANTED: Somebody to go into the Dark Net with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 246, Mendocino, CA 93022. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before.