> You didn’t really have one big app that you could open and order it to entertain you. Instead, you had a few dozen of bookmarks to websites, each with a specific idea in mind.

This overlooks how common custom homepages such as Lycos, Yahoo! and MSN were and how the browsers pushed these as their default home pages.

While they may not be as addictive as "the algorithm" of today, they were still packed with clickbait images/links to attract your attention and ads to drain your wallet.

MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021108094511/http://www.msn.co...

My MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021107081016/http://my.msn.com...

Microsoft is still hawking this same beat decades later

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