Why Gopher — A Personal Note
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I have from time to time checked in to see what's going on in
gopherspace, having used it just as the Web was taking over.  The
notion of an antiquated underbelly still ticking away appealed to me.
But there didn't seem to be much going on, and it always seemd to be,
well, limited.

It was checking in on Charles Childers site a few times that put me on
to the gopher renaissance.  He eventually made the gopher site the
main thing, and the web site a copy.  I found myself a gopher client,
started poking around, and found several thriving communities.

At first I thought it was kind of quaint, but after a while, I started
to appreciate the austerity of the plain text, the slower pace of
interaction, and lack of noise and shonkiness.  It's not that the
general badness of the Web was news to me, but it's not until I
experienced an alternative that I realised the full extent of my
irritation with the Web.

Then I got interested in the protocol.  I made a simple gopher server,
because I needed a project (for various reasons).  Then I wrote a
client.

So there's a few things that appeal: the simplicity, the DIY
possibilities, the fun of discovery, the retrocomputing angle, but a
lot of it is just getting away from the noise. 

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   [ what follows from here on in is a mad rant about the Web] 

Let's face it, the Web has always been pretty shonky.

For a few days there in 1991, HTML was the light, logical markup
language TimBL intended it to be.  But before long there were image
maps, blink tags, inline frames, marquees of scrolling text!  Animated
gifs, sites shoehorned into invisible tables... then the badly-named
Javascript came along to program the whole thing, except of course
nothing was compatible with anything else, and before long there were
sites developed entirely inside complicated, opaque, proprietary
frameworks like Shockwave Flash.  

People wanted something much richer than providing textual content
with a little markup indicating a few things like headings,  so
browser producers and other companies produced things to fill in the
gaps.

The Web is now finally on better technical footing than it's ever
been, obviating the need for third-party plugins, and it's very
capable.  But how does it get used?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a plain text purist (they exist!).  I
appreciate a nicely designed website.  I can see the value in an open
platform for online applications, indeed I have used this to make a
gopher client!

But so often websites are ugly, difficult to use, and filled with
irritating visual noise (and sometimes auditory noise!).  Frequently
they are filled with advertisements, desperately trying to monetize
one's presence by attempting to mesmerize you into buying something.
There can be two or three videos playing in one's peripheral vision.
There's a sequence of insulting click-bait photos promising salacious
thrills, home remedies for toe fungus, or some boring list of ten
things I don't care about.

And the notifications!  Every website wants to notify you constantly!
They're worse than prosetylizers in the street, or the person in the
office who thinks that everyone is terribly invested in minor details
of their life. 

And it all incredibly voluminous.  Sites I read almost entirely for
their text content take up hundreds of megabytes of my computer's
memory.

Then there's the creepy tracking that goes on.

And don't get me started about social media.  The one thing I will say
about it here is that it's all large companies wanting to control your
experience, often your experience of content that you — and others
like you — create.  You can see this in the insistance that you
download an app — an application-capable web isn't enough, they need
even more control and less openness.

The early web was shonky, but it was shonky because it was filled with
people doing it for themselves.  They (we) were kids who have just
worked out how to set fonts and colours in a wordprocessor or graphics
program.  Lots of people who would never have gotten into computers
through traditional programming got their start this way.

Now it's shonky because it's awash with glitzy con-artists.  They wear
fancy suits and drive fast machines, and they're always ready with a
toothy smile, but they're not your friends.  They only care about your
interests so they can sell you things — or just sell _you_.