I wouldn't be surprised if the author, and a large segment of HNers agreeing with her, did a swift about-face when they realized that Tor also provides an end-run around the internet backbone black-holing of IPs that some Tier 1 ISPs did to KiwiFarms last year, during the height of the campaign to deplatform it. More people using Tor in general means more people having the means and know-how to evade censorship, and we can't have that, can we?
I don't think anyone would be surprised - what you're describing is pretty obvious to anyone who has ever looked into Tor for more than .1 seconds. It's also pretty well understood that when restrictions can be evaded it will be used for both good & bad purposes, that's just the nature of it.
That accusation has been repeatedly debunked. Also, on a more positive note, amongst all the gossiping and somewhat rude behaviour, they've documented a significant amount of illegal activity by others. In particular, how certain individuals of gender have been grooming children and committing sex crimes - which is why these creeps tried so hard to take Kiwifarms offline. And ultimately failed, as it's still up and running, even on the clearnet.
Not even wikipedia own founder believes on it anymore. It's essentially useless for anything political related because you already know that they will be heavily biased in favor of a given side...
Actually wouldn't a move to Tor completely destroy the ability to effectively moderate any sort of community since you have no way of banning spammers/bots? Even a "lawless" place like 8chan or Kiwifarms will have trouble holding discussions if all their forums are filled with copy-pasted CP from some random botnet
