"Does anyone collect data about the types or categories of messages submitted on the site"?

If god forbid dread is seized cant law enforcement look at the request timing of users and correlate them with real world tor users?

On the request side, Dread is a very active site. In my opinion it would be very difficult unless you have complete overview of all traffic on the tor network. Maybe if you already identified someone and you wanted to correlate their dread user with them too. Spying on them and correlating the time they are active on dread posting against them out in the world.

Tor requires random delays and message padding with random data to be secure enough for my liking. Every user should be indistinguishable from one another period. Why this is not already done is beyond me.

Because cookies are a thing. Requests to dread are private and if you don't sign in we won't be able to know which user is requesting stuff. But if you sign in we know that cookie is associated with that user. You can't have indistinguishable users when the users themselves identify themself.

What I meant is that if every request looked the same for every tor user, there would be no possibility to correlate traffic. Constant stream of 500kb/s, good luck correlating that. When I press post on dread it can be easily calculated how many bytes my post request was no as there is no variation in size other than the message? Thus I have been thinking of manually editing all post requests to contain bogus data in the form that the dread server will discard. Or add a constant stream of random data to the guard relay. Maybe dread could have a feature like that, a hidden field with a random amount of data. Perhaps I'm overthinking, I do it a lot.

Tor already has packet padding to counter correlation of traffic. I'm more talking about fingerprinting of users who are on the dread site itself.

I think you'll find that any types of maps, flavours, categories, and all that have already been made. Check out the sub for any subject and you'll find things to point you in the right direction. It sounds like you are looking for data on a surface level, such as how many people are buying products. The nature of Dread and black markets make even this very difficult. I would start by categorizing each drug available, then see how many vendors are selling it on each market, and then research how many orders have been placed for each product. This will take a great deal of time but could be interesting. Good luck!

No, you misunderstand. I don't mean subs, i mean actual posts within and across subs. E.g.: how many bottles post requests for hacking services, or soliciting for chimps to do scam x, or asking "rate my opsec". I suppose what my train of thought leads to is content tagging like you see in clearnet spaces like twatter and fb. I am not interested in drugs. I am interested in information, and other things that are outside the scope of this site.

I know you are interested in information, like I said it's all here just dive into the subs and read up.

Never mind. It's probably being scraped for AI.

Being scraped for AI? Do you mean being scraped "by" AI, as in AI is actively gathering information? There isn't much here that a researcher could gather, too much static and misinformation. Any researcher worth their salt would get statistics and collect intel elsewhere.

No, "scraping" for AI... i.e.: collecting all the comments and posts and pumping them into a model to find patterns of "speech" and from there to generate similar types of posts. I don't know what kind of AI you think would be scraping here. I don't know what you understand about AI or intel; you are after all, just a bottle.