I'd love to see some valid reasons for using Tor to browse HN. To discuss solutions, you need to define the problem first. I don't know, use a VPN service or set up your own?
> I'd love to see some valid reasons for using Tor to browse HN.
Many countries have restrictive firewalls, for example. In other countries things may not be blocked, but people know their actions are being monitored and would prefer to be able to communicate openly without self-censorship.
> To discuss solutions, you need to define the problem first. I don't know, use a VPN service or set up your own?
I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of my post. I am technically inclined and I'm sure I could find many workarounds. But that will not help other tor users. The hope by posting this here is that the HN admins will see it and try to give tor users a better user experience. Other people in the tech community might see it and decide to deal with tor users in a better way themselves.
To preempt the inevitable, I am not saying any of these people have any obligation to serve tor users. But I suspect most of this is not done intentionally and the people running sites do not realize how they inconvenience a segment of their userbase.
Tor is not the only tool out there to protect privacy/circumvent restrictions. It has flaws by design, such as all traffic has to pass through limited number of known exit nodes, and you cannot easily filter out unwanted stuff, so a CAPTCHA in one form or another is pretty much the only solution. If you suggesting to just replace it with some easier implementation, it would be automated.
So the solution is on the users' side. Just choose another approach that works for you, such as VPN. You won't get CAPTCHA'd, privacy still protected, problem solved. One way or another, technically inclined users are not the ones experiencing problems with restrictions.
As I said, this thread was meant to encourage discussion of how websites can better service tor users. "Don't use tor then" isn't really helpful in that context.
To seed this discussion with an idea rather than letting it degenerate further, how about only requiring CAPTCHAs for account signups/logins, allowing read-only access? It would not solve everything, but it would sure make things better.
