My thought is that they have low adoption rates, which means standards that advance at the pace of a dead snail. People fill their sites with slow, pointless/malicious scripts and bad design because they can. People can also choose not to do those things. "Quality" via stringent restriction is unecessary and misguided.

I've tried gopher before, and it really does all it needs to (there's even an imageboard available, 1436chan, gopher://khzae.net/1/chan).
I like how it forces everything to be usable be text-only browsers, text being the universal interface.
Making a gopherhole is also fun because it's so easy. It is what the web should be.
If Gemini is pretty much that but in encrypted, then I'd probably be on board as well, but I haven't tried it yet.

>>2173
I really like Gemini. I believe Gemini has some kind of scalability issue however so it could never become a replacement for HTTP. Nonetheless, I intend to use it myself at some point. I do like the idea of forcibly keeping things simple.

It's more an issue of content, not protocol, so I don't think alternative protocols will be that useful to solving this. That is, you can choose to make plain-text no-js sites served over http but not many people do so nowadays. Although I guess the giants are trying to stamp out plain http in favor of http over tls which seems pretty pointless for most read-only content.