________ ________ ________
2019-05-31 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
One reason you'll see cited over and over / _/ / /
again for people "leaving the Web for Gopher \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
forever" is the state of the Web, hyper- / \/ \/ / \
commercialized and greedy, immoral and / _/ /_ _/
hostile. True. But turning to Gopher will /- / _/ /
not save you. \________/\________/\___/____/
At least, not without sacrifice and discipline.
The Web didn't start out in this state, it evolved that way. It's natural
selection. The more people consumed garbage, the more money garbage vendors
made so the more incentive there was to produce it, and the bigger the garbage
vendors got the more smaller people wanted a piece of the pie and it's wanting
a piece of that that drives content generation.
And in line with that, it's getting a piece that drives content discovery.
I'm sure there's a wealth of people on the Web creating content for content's
sake being squeezed out of discussion and search results by multimedia giants
with fat wallets.
These are the first two things you will need to sacrifice.
Firstly, the Web showers us with content. Blogs, vlogs, podcasts, dank
memes. If you move to Gopher you are going to have to adjust to a drastically
slower pace, maybe two or three articles a day, and significantly different
content. Gopher content is fairly similar to the early blogosphere in that
tends to be far more personal or much narrower in scope. I can't think of any
phlogs out there that cover the tech news or gaming or anything like that in
any broad way.
And secondly discoverability in Gopher space is quite limited, Bitreich's
Lawn does well and FloodGap's new servers is a good list but they're about
your only options, there's no central place for people to spruik your content
like you would see on Facebook or any of the hip blogs on the surface Web.
Aside from the two examples cited above you're pretty much limited to word of
mouth.
It's not all doom and gloom though, the flip side of both those points both
work in Gopher's favor, The low-volume of Gopher content makes it not only
easy to keep up with the latest happenings, it also invites contemplation and
conversation because you're just just barreling on to the next listicle or
salacious drama, and in turn that conversation drives discoverability in a
very human way, instead of machine-generated, SEO-boosting blog posts you're
finding things because people found them interesting enough to take the time
to write about them.
The last sacrifice I want to talk about is the dopamine rush. While there
is social media in Gopher space, it's a far smaller community and moves
drastically slower than what most people are used to on the Web and if you're
addicted to that dopamine-feedback loop you get from that environment then
you're in for a bad time. In my opinion this is the number one reason for
people abandoning Gopher in the modern day. For whatever reason they rage quit
the Web only to realize that down here there's nothing to feed that addiction.
Content moves slow, there's no upvotes, likes or comments section and any
conflict is resolved through civil discussion, so they nope out and go back to
their poisonous ad-cloud.
In my barely-educated opinion, as people act out in more violent, more
reckless and more dramatic ways to get the attention that feeds their
addiction, dopamine addiction is a crisis waiting to happen. Social media is
as toxic to the psyche as cigarettes are to the body and one day society will
look back on it with the same "how was that ok?" puzzlement as we would today
at the sight of children casually smoking in an old photograph.
Ok, now I'm just ranting haha. Anyway, to conclude; throw yourself headlong
into Gopher space and revel in it but don't expect it to be a magic bullet to
save you from the state of the Web, it's you that'll need to break habits,
break cycles, break addictions or who knows what combination of the three and
save yourself.
That said: it can be done! Come join us underground.
