Comment by throwaway150

It definitely looks only annoying by modern standards because today we are willing to let websites load MBs of crap into our browser to show text news and nobody thinks twice about it.

But when Clippy was forced upon us then it definitely felt user hostile. The threshold for what computer users (there were fewer of them) would call user hostile was lower then. The only redeeming feature of Clippy was that you could disable it easily. But it was still user hostile when it ran.

So yes, coming from the context of those old days, Clippy was both annoying and user hostile then.

It's a pet peeve of mine that the norms have changed so much so that such user hostile UX is considered "annoying" at most today when the right term for it IMO is "user hostile".