2026.04.13 8 min read The act of pumping immense, disproportionate resources — money, crowdsourced math, analytics, optimization, min-maxing, popular opinion aggregation, etc. — into a previously casual or complex, layered activity to forcefully extract and squeeze out the purest, most concentrated dopamine hit, with no regard for anything except dopamine. Origin One late evening while chatting on Discord, I coined the term "dopamine fracking" to describe a phenomenon that has become increasingly prevalent in online culture — a concept which I previously struggled to express. It's a metaphor, because just like in actual fracking, it is immensely harmful to the long-term health and sustainability of anything it is applied to, but in the short term, it can yield a very intense and concentrated hit of dopamine (or oil).…