Or maybe they weren’t and you’re just making an appeal to antiquity out of misplaced nostalgia and recollections about some amorphous Golden Age that never quite existed as you remember.
The obsession with modern software has with mining every single bit of data they can is a huge step in the wrong direction. The silly "features"--like the 'what you do' or 'what your friends' do reports--are more annoying than interesting.
I don't mind, or might even enjoy, that kind of thing when I sign up for it, but it really doesn't need to be in every piece of software I use.