New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why did GPG / PGP fail?

Ask HN: Why did GPG / PGP fail?
2 by charles_f | 6 comments on Hacker News.
PGP and GPG have been around for a long time, but they don't seem that have reached wide adoption - notably none of the massive Gmail, Hotmails and Yahoos of the world* have adopted it. The technology is strong, decentralized, and easy to setup if you're moderately technologically literate, and surely could be completely abstracted away by any platform willing to do so. There are even browser extensions like mailvelope that allow you to add the GPG overlay to any webmail. Meanwhile we're still relying massively on email, sending un-encrypted bits of texts, with no way of authenticating the sender with 100% reliability. We receive tons of spam. All the protections that are put in place - DKIM, SPF, are hard to setup and imperfect. These seem problems that GPG could help tremendously with. In parallel, technologies like Oauth, and now WebAuthn that bear somewhat similar concepts, are receiving massive adoption. So it gets me to wonder: what's the catch? Why isn't everyone using GPG now? Even without knowing it? * sure, Proton and Fast might be different but they're 2 OM smaller