From the first link: Finally, the relative numeric success of Gopher over WWW was discussed (there are orders of magnitude more Gopher servers than WWW servers

From the first link: Finally, the relative numeric success of Gopher over WWW was discussed (there are orders of magnitude more Gopher servers than WWW servers out there): Gopher seems to have won out primarily because of the ease of entry (it's much harder to put up a WWW server than a Gopher server), although another factor may be that a hierarchical presentation is more appropriate than hypertext for the broad-based audience of a CWIS. :)