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.

:)

When I started my CS degree we still used mostly Gopher, the WWW browsers started to appear on campus AIX, DG/UX terminals around one year later.

I was pretty disappointed when Mozilla dropped native Gopher support from Firefox.

There's still plugins for it though.

There can be overlap here with Gopher servers written in golang like https://code.google.com/p/gogopherd/.

I've been meaning to extend a Hakyll backend for Gopher sites, and then to set up a RPi gopher server and duplicating my site to it.

Or actual gophers for that matter.