https://ils.unc.edu/callee/gopherpaper.htm

Gopher did succeed, we fully supported it in Mosaic. :-)

More fundamentally, Gopher was a hierarchy (tree) of information, whereas the web was freeform pages with arbitrary links. Users preferred the latter.

Seems we are at a similar revolution point..

“WWW has not proliferated as has Gopher, in part because WWW services are more complex to create and maintain” - Feb 1993 https://web.archive.org/web/20180822042146/http://www.upenn.edu:80/computing/printout/archive/v09/4/navigation.html