The main internet didn’t get tame, they just got better at hiding it. But that’s the point. There’s more cp on the clear web than dark web because the clear web is much much larger than the dark web, and the dark web is more heavily tracked with a large FBI presence.

Reddit had and still has issues with CP, weird threads with numbers and hash codes? Very likely some kind of downloading ring. There’s still “sink” threads on places like 4chan where a user posts an innocuous image, but upon closer inspection a single image file is way larger than it should be, meaning they injected the file with more files, by exploiting the metadata to turn an image file into essentially a zip folder. Isis used to use that method to recruit new members on twitter, out in the open they’d post a picture of some isis soldiers and if you extracted the files within the image you got recruitment docs and instructions on how to leave your country and fight with isis.