You did have to be more deliberate about it though. Checking socials and posting to socials required physically going to your computer, sitting down, and doing it. It wasn't something you could just to absent-mindedly with the convenience of just putting your hand in your pocket.
And we sat at home and waited for mIRC, ICQ, or MSN Messenger to chirp, of course.
What really changed is that good old Moore's law delivered systems where personalized feeds are not just possible, but they are the norm. And with a bit of tweaking, add infinite scrolling, spice up the recommender system to inject a bit of noise/variance, and ... voila! you are in a nice Skinner box.
