we have this thread every once in a while
i usually spend about 6 or 7 hours a week on the deep web. most of the time i'm on chat rooms which are usually pretty tame, they just have no rules. i occasionally branch around and stuff, but i have yet to buy anything off of the deep web.
yes, there is child research. yes, there is snuff. yes, there is gore. yes, you can buy drugs and weapons. yes, you can hire hitmen. yes, it's possible to find lost media (i have some on my hard drive, nothing illegal though). yes, it's full of memes, and no, any
supernatural creepypastas like holy3 are not real... as far as i'm aware.
it's really not that bad of a network. you can connect through tor and just go from the hidden wiki. you won't stumble on anything like the stuff above unless you actively search for it, too. you just find neat little personal websites or sites offering services like email or filehosting.
I've tried to find CP on 'le black net' but could never actually get anything. My guess is that you have to know a guy to get in on it.
a lot of sites were taken down by some FBI busts in 2014 and 2015. some have come back up and you definitely don't need any special connections to find it
i wonder what the memes are like, probably a bunch of meta in-jokes
the memes are dank. one of the image boards i go on (it hasn't hosted images since like 2014..) has a /bus/ board. i'm pretty sure that was a really old 4chan joke but old memes are still quite alive there