What makes gopher still relevant in 2024, for information centred
activities (like research [0], as opposed to shopping, gossiping and
showing-off) is that it's structured.
What's becoming irrelevant about the Web is search. The decline of
search - and the whole spider/retrieval model - is a real problem in
the post AI-SEO-optimised spam epoch.
The Web is really a giant heap. People stopped usefully linking over a
decade ago. By contrast Gopher offers a different way of discovering
content because it tends toward structure.
You're pretending you can't do on the web what you can do on Gopher. This is just the most absurd argument.
Anyone building a gopherhole can built the exact same structure on a website. Better is anyone can access it because most of the planet carries a web browser in their pocket. If you want to put together structured content on the web no one is stopping you.
Fetishizing gopher is the weirdest thing. You're making arguments about SEO and then talking about a protocol that offers zero discovery unless someone fires up some old Veronica servers. If you're unconcerned about SEO/Google there's no reason to include anything SEO or Google related on a website.
It's fine to dislike how Google has ruined the web. That doesn't make the web itself bad or useless. Today you can use the web the exact same way we did thirty years ago. It has way more capability (even ignoring JavaScript bullshit) than gopher and you can reliably send a link to content to someone that isn't obsessed with a dead protocol.
That's like saying you can do anything by writing a book that you can
do with haiku.
It's trivially true. But it misses the value of strongly imposed
constraints. I know that goes against a prevailing (well USA) culture
of "bigger and more is always better".
Sometimes less is more.
> It's fine to dislike how Google has ruined the web. That doesn't
make the web itself bad or useless.
It sort of does though. It's like saying; yeah it's bad that loads of
drug dealers and thieves moved into the neighbourhood. but that
doesn't make the neighbourhood itself bad. For practical purposes it
totally does. It may not make the buildings and streets bad, as if a
technology in isolation could be "bad", but it makes nobody want to go
there.
Your neighborhood analogy is nonsensical. You can't ignore drug dealers in a neighborhood. You can ignore Google. You can build a website and not give two shits about Google. There's zero requirement for a website to run ads, host trackers, or even use JavaScript. You can just type some HTML into a text editor and put it on a server.
Websites are not physical neighborhoods. They're not affected by things in physical proximity. A visitor is not affected by anything in physical proximity. A website, like a gopher site only contains the content the owner put up. You can put up a bunch of plain text on a website to show how much of a hipster you are. No one is stopping you.
True but incidental, possibly anathema, to the point...
Which is that physical neighborhoods make up the user-base of the web, whether they be large server farms or small form-factor computing devices.
And because those users live in real neighborhoods, connected by real wires (or radio waves connected to towers that are connected by wires), the following statement simply isn't true:
> Your neighborhood analogy is nonsensical. You can't ignore drug dealers in a neighborhood.
You can't ignore cyber-criminals or SEO farms that are trying to sell you stuff. There are real neighborhoods made by real people and real devices, just because you can't draw a nice circle around it on a single landmass on a map doesn't make them less real.
> You can build a website and not give two shits about Google.
You can, but you building a website is not you using a website. This is no different than glorifying Gopher - yes the protocol is there, but if no one is using it in the way you intend to use it then it hardly matters?
I don't think gopher is necessarily the best protocol, but there is probably a real "neighborhood effect", at least for a while (until the metaphorical drug dealers move in again).
Neither gopher nor http+www does much for solving that issue, though.
What's becoming irrelevant about the Web is search. The decline of search - and the whole spider/retrieval model - is a real problem in the post AI-SEO-optimised spam epoch.
The Web is really a giant heap. People stopped usefully linking over a decade ago. By contrast Gopher offers a different way of discovering content because it tends toward structure.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40345006