Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000167 · Internet History → Dead platforms → Dark web forums · 2018–2026
Dread (forum)
Dark web Reddit where illegal markets talk openly
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“Reddit banned the darknet market subreddits in 2018, so the users built their own Reddit on Tor.”
Why Noah kept it
Dread is the Reddit-style forum darknet market users set up on Tor in 2018 after Reddit banned r/DarkNetMarkets, and market admins post signed announcements there. Nothing in the Ark covers the dark web yet, and a reference copy costs under 13 KB.
- In the Ark since
- 28 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.6 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 23.4 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_(forum)
What it is
Dread is a Reddit-style forum on the dark web launched in February 2018. It became the main place where administrators of illegal darknet markets posted announcements, coordinated with users and discussed law enforcement actions. The site grew to thousands of users after Reddit banned its own darknet market communities.
Why it’s internet culture
Dread shows how illegal online markets built infrastructure and community around themselves. People treated it like a normal social platform, with moderators, sub-forums and gossip, which meant the culture of darknet markets became visible and documented rather than hidden.
When Reddit banned its darknet market communities in 2018, users rebuilt the same kind of forum on Tor, with subforums, moderators, gossip and PGP-signed announcements from market admins. It shows people running an illegal trade with the habits of an ordinary message board.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2018 · Tor hidden service (the dark web) · Also known as Dread; subdreads; /d/
- What it is
- Dread is a discussion website that can only be reached through Tor, software that hides both the visitor's location and where a website is hosted. It copies the layout of Reddit, a popular forum site of the time. Users join topic sections called subdreads (written /d/ plus a name), post threads, comment and vote. Most of the talk is about darknet markets, hidden shops selling mainly illegal drugs for cryptocurrency, along with scams, police raids and safety advice.
- Where it came from
- In March 2018 Reddit changed its rules to ban communities that helped people buy drugs and other restricted goods. That closed r/DarkNetMarkets, the main open place where market buyers swapped reviews and warnings. Dread had opened weeks earlier, run by an administrator called HugBunter and later also one called Paris. Displaced Reddit users moved across, and it reportedly passed 12,000 accounts within three months. After police seized DeepDotWeb, a news and link site about the markets, in 2019, Dread was the main gathering point left.
- Why it mattered
- Darknet markets rarely lasted long: they were seized by police or their owners ran off with the money. Dread outlasted most of them, so users relied on it to find out which markets were still real, which links were genuine and who had been arrested. When it went offline for weeks in 2019, users assumed police had taken it, which shows how much depended on it. It was also a regular target of large attacks that flooded it with traffic and knocked it offline.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- People running an illegal trade rebuilt Reddit almost exactly, with moderators, upvotes and rows about the rules. Trust between anonymous strangers came down to review posts and cryptographic signatures, the same thing ordinary online shoppers did with reviews, only with more at stake.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (1.9 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.3 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (2.3 KB)
- All images (13.1 KB)
- Original
- 23.4 KB
- Ark cost
- 12.6 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.3 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.3 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 53.8% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,441 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 1,950 |
History
Kept
“Dread is the Reddit-style forum darknet market users set up on Tor in 2018 after Reddit banned r/DarkNetMarkets, and market admins post signed announcements there. Nothing in the Ark covers the dark web yet, and a reference copy costs under 13 KB.”