Explain Like I'm Five

by using tor browser or an i2p router.

dark web generally refers to .onion addresses in the case of tor. It's cryptographically impossible with current supercomputers as it would need to go through 8 * 10^74 combinations before finding the correct one. to put that into scale, on average, it would take 8 septillion years for a supercomputer to find a value.

Onion addresses can be used for virtually anything, I - for one thing - have implemented a nextcloud instance on tor. That said I have not encountered a onion address that showed anything illegal, but that's also because I haven't been searching.

It is. I was curious many years ago, and downloaded a TOR browser to see what it was all about.

It's not as easy as Googling what ever your looking for. Or, at least not when I tried. You pretty much had to know where to start and follow links like breadcrumbs to see where they would take you.

I did find some stuff, most of it was harmless privacy obsessed blogs but I did find some clearly illegal sites.

It really was a pain to navigate, and more of a waste of time than anything, since I wasn't looking to accomplish any "dark" goals.

I guess those that NEED to access the dark web, will learn how to do what they need, but 99% of people will never have reason to bother.

Generally with TOR or a Tails live CD.

I personally don't find anything of value there. There is porn, legal and illegal kinds, drug stores, credit card stores, there is even a Turkish database of all their citizens from a couple years ago.

Some small communities 4chan style.

There are a lot of scam sites too, either run by feds or just regular scammers.