Optimizing something purely for the hit destroys everything that made it worth having

Take something with genuine complexity: a music genre, an online community, a strawberry. Pour industrial-scale resources into it with one goal, extracting the most concentrated reward possible. Analytics, A/B testing, crowdsourced optimization, algorithmic amplification. It works. You do get more hit per unit. But the thing you end up with is not the original thing anymore.

A real strawberry has hundreds of compounds, hundreds of strains, unpredictable texture, the occasional worm, the occasional transcendent one from your grandma's garden. Decompose it, extract the single aromatic compound that registers as "strawberry," synthesize it cheaply, put it in everything. You get something that hits harder and costs less. You also get something that is not a strawberry. It is a chemical that kind of smells like one.

The same operation runs on music, on video formats, on internet communities, on relationships. The complex, layered original gets mined for its active ingredient, and everything else, the texture, the imperfection, the slow-burn weirdness, gets discarded as noise. What is left is technically the genre, technically the community, technically a conversation. But the substrate is gone.

The term for this is "dopamine fracking." Like actual fracking: impressive yield, hollowed-out ground underneath.

Source claim: Optimizing a complex human experience purely for dopamine extracts the active ingredient while destroying everything else that made the experience worth having.