Why gopher is still relevant

Once upon a time the Web was bling-free too. Then people actually started using it, and anytime a large enough audience congregates in one space, pressure builds on the owners of that space to tart it up. So added to the Web were images and animated GIFs, frames and IFRAMEs, RealAudio and Flash, stylesheets and scripts, Bootstrap and React, and all the other ten thousand layers of cruft that now sit between the Web user and the content she came to read.

This may sound like a knock on the Web, but it isn't. The Web got all that stuff because the Web was where the eyeballs were. If Gopher had won out instead, it'd be the one straining under the weight of all that crap today, and the Web would be the pure, unsullied, bling-free alternative. Purity and popularity are incompatible.

In other words: if you like Gopher the way it is today, for the love of God, don't tell anyone about it.