system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5 what Tor is, and why everyone praises it as the king of proxies.
gpt
Imagine the internet as a phone system.

When you make a regular call, it's easy to see who is calling who (caller ID) and what they're saying (phone taps and the like). What TOR does is splits everything up and encrypts it. So instead of calling the person you want to talk to directly, you call a designated stranger, and give him your message in code. Then he calls another person, and re-encodes your message. Then that person sends it along again, each of them decoding and encoding parts of the message, but never the whole thing at once. Eventually, the message gets to where it was intended to go, and then the reply is sent back the same way. 

Now imagine that this is happening at the speed of light, millions of times a second, and instead of talking you're looking at a screen. That's TOR.