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Comment by froh | Hacker News Reader

i got much more out of it and it's intelligently written

I see this structure:

* introduce dopamine fracking

* the wonderful strawberry analogy to what we loose, personally, by giving in to the substitue for the real thing

* how they (the author) managed to in baby steps turn down attempts at fracking _their_ dopamine: through awareness of what's happening and what were missing because of it

so until there is some bigger scale solution, we can at least self regulate.

and overall the article is a positive note in difficult times.

I especially loved the strawberry analogy.

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There's an unresolved tension within the article:

* some parts of it imply it's about higher intensity, 'bigger' dopamine hits * while other parts talk about commodification, i.e. making these 'dopamine hits' as cheaply as possible, with as little other substance as possible

Not the same thing. There's a connection - reducing 'substance' make it more 'pure' dopamine, also there's some loudness war between different sources. But still, in the end people generally don't feel anything intense when scrolling tiktok, it's just enough to grab attention.

I guess more direct analogy with fracking might work better: it squeezes dopamine hit out of things which normally don't warrant attention.

"commodification" (and "industrialization" and "over-consumption") were just alternative terms they tried before settling on "dopamine fracking". that's it. and exactly because theses terms are not synonyms at all and exactly because they fit worse, the author settles on fracking: squeezing a ressource out of our brains no matter the collateral damage, as you then identified.

Same here, I enjoyed it too. A lot of people are nitpicking on the strawberry analogy, but there is certainly something to be said about the commodification of everything.

I agree with you, also about the strawberry analogy. I was quite surprised to read that author is 22 years old. So many young smart people around!

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