Value is now only _extracted_. Place the acquired good into the press and smash it until all but the faintest essence remains among the mash. The squeezings are bottled and saved to pay for future _extractions_.
Companies like Valve can continue largely unshittificated because they are private. Once that is no longer the case, all our game rentals will be squozen away from us.
He could have gotten $5bn ten years ago (for great justic... quarterly results) and then have his lunch eaten by Epic and GOG. He clearly doesn't understand how to do current year capitalism.
I think Gabe is an example of how you can stop at absurdly rich and still make your customers happy. The enshittification is only necessary to go beyond absurdly rich.
He's somewhere in the top 300 wealthiest people in the world; forget one-percenter, that's something like top 0.00001%. He definitely has done a lot of nice things for gaming and I hope he continues to do so for the rest of his days but let's not pretend he's not beyond absurdly rich.
German here. A "Verschlimmbesserung" is something that makes one part better and another part worse. If it only makes things worse you don't need a German word for it, you can just call it worse.
For things that were intended good, but ended up bad, there's an English idiom: the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
I don't remember hearing or using it in this context. It's pretty rare that the goal was to make something worse and if the outcome is only bad, you can just call it bad, right? The word is only needed to communicate that there were good and bad outcomes.
As a German, I might not have thought of that but would absolutely use it to translate Verschlimmbesserung. Does it sound "normal" enough to native English speakers?
The sibling post's "disimprovement" sounds more natural and has parallel form with pre-existing broadly accepted English words like "disincentive" and "disinfect".
It's totally plausible portmanteau. I get the feeling thought that it sounds more marked in English than in German where these kind of mashups are formed more freely.
"updowngrade", funnily enough, I would understand as having the (IMO misunderstood/wrong) meaning you're trying to give to "Verschlimmbesserung" in your post here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483585 (making some parts better and some other parts worse.)
That's not what "worseprovement" conveys to me, you can worseprove a single part, intending to make it better, making that same thing actually worse by the very same change.
> The story... relates how a solitary gardener encounters a lonely bear and they decide to become companions. One of the bear's duties is to keep the flies off his friend when he takes a nap. Unable to drive off a persistent fly, the bear seizes a paving stone to crush it and kills the gardener as well
> [..]
> The fable has given to the French language the idiom le pavé de l'ours (the bear's paving stone) and to German Bärendienst (a bear's service), both used for doing somebody or something a disservice or bad turn and sometimes for any ill-considered action with an unfortunate result. The Danish and Norwegian word bjørnetjeneste (bear-service) has similar meanings and the idiom also appears in other European languages.
It‘s „bear service“, and context is slightly different. You do bear service to someone, and Verschlimmbesserung is on something. Both signal intent to do something good, but doing bear service is an act of screwing up while doing that, no prior condition required, and Verschlimmbesserung is the outcome of such attempt applied to something that was ok before.
It's actually a verb, "Verschlimmbesserung" is the substantivization.
Base: verschlimmbessern
Present conjugation: I verschlimmbesser[e], you verschlimmbesserst, he/she/it verschlimmbessert, we verschlimmbesser[e]n, (plural-)you verschlimmbessert, they verschlimmbesser[e]n
The [e] at the end is leftover from an older form, in the cases where I omitted it it would sound archaic to a German speaker, but in the other cases it's equivalent or may even sound better. It's also regionally different. The archaic versions kinda sound south German (Swabian, Bavarian).
[ed. made some adjustments]
P.S.: "Verbesserung" means improvement, "Verschlimmerung" means worsening/aggravation. The combined word is understood quite specifically though, not just as a combination of the two. It's *not* a normal case of German "paste words together", that's for nouns (you can do it with the substantivization, e.g. Donaudampfschiffverschlimmbesserungskapitän = "captain of verschlimmbessern the steam ships on the Donau", which makes little sense of course). It's not identical to enshittification either, the latter (to me at least) implies intention; verschlimmbessern you can (and probably often will) do by accident.
無 (the question cannot be answered because it relies on unmet prerequisites)
"Verbesserschlimmung" isn't a word in active use & depending on how it (theoretically) were to enter use, its meaning might vary. It could enter usage with identical meaning, or it could mean the opposite: a change intended to worsen things that made them better. It's a bit like "inflammable".
(Also: this is why I pointed out it's not formed according to the agglutination rules that apply for concatenated nouns in German. For those, the meaning can be logically derived. This is a portmanteau, those don't quite follow rigid rules.)
It's not totally clear from the examples given, but I feel like in some cases these changes aren't a genuine effort to improve things. They're just a sort of cycle of changing things to chase fads or look busy.
Office 2003 is a terrible example, office is a product that deliberately makes one part worse on each "upgrade" so that the consumer has a reason to upgrade to another release.
Video quality is bad, there are probably better ones but it has english
subtitles. The idea here is basically the guy tries to improve something,
but in the end kind of causes the whole room to become devastated. That's
kind of Verschlimmbesserung: meaning to do well, but failing to do so and
causing more harm than good. (Also in the comments people connect this to
Friedrich Merz; the guy is really losing popular support by the minute
now. Just recently where he was unhappy how real people ask him critical
questions.)
„Verschlimbesserung” is what your spouse thinks about each of your improvements to the home automation setup, or, indeed, the whole idea of home automation.
A misfeature is specifically a feature that's just bad, while verschlimmbessern can happen with everything that nobody would call a feature (insert something about xkcd 1172). But yeah, it's pretty close
The modern tech industry is fundamentally broken, the incentive structure is wrong. No one even knows how to ship finished software any more. Everything's a perpetual beta now. It makes me really sad.
I do think it's part of many people's vocabulary. It's a bit informal. And it's not a word you use every day. But it's definitely a word that gets used when the occasion calls for it, just like the related verb "verschlimmbessern."
"Enshittification" isn't the same thing. "Verschlimmbesserung" is when you try to fix a loose connection in a power cord and then no electricity flows at all, or when you try to fix a bad haircut with a trimmer and the haircut ends up looking even worse, etc.
It's certainly used - not in the top 100, but if the situation calls for it, it's not unexpected.
There's a big difference between enshitification and "Verschlimmbesserung". The latter has the intent of actually improving things, while the first is making things knowingly worse for profit.
Enshittification is when the perpetrator intentionally does make a product worse, like locking previously free features behind a paywall with a firmware update, or covers components of an electric device with some goop to make it unrepairable.
Verschlimmbesserung is when the perpetrator has good but ultimately misguided intentions. For example, so middle manager might think that replacing but buttons on a vacuum cleaner with app integration adds value, but ultimately it's replacing something simple, boring and reliable with an overengineered solution that causes more problems than it solves.
There is some overlap between the two: someone could make make a Verschlimmbesserung even though he knows no one wants the change, but he can pad his resume with it. In general I'd say enshittification leans more towards malice, while Verschlimmbesserung leans more towards incompetence.
> Verschlimmbesserung is not widely used these days in Germany.
77 comments:
Value is now only _extracted_. Place the acquired good into the press and smash it until all but the faintest essence remains among the mash. The squeezings are bottled and saved to pay for future _extractions_.
Companies like Valve can continue largely unshittificated because they are private. Once that is no longer the case, all our game rentals will be squozen away from us.
TIL squozen is the past participle of squeeze, but only because I first thought hah this guy is making words up. Foiled again!
Gabe Newell has an $11bn net worth so he hasn't exactly been not squeezing.
He could have gotten $5bn ten years ago (for great justic... quarterly results) and then have his lunch eaten by Epic and GOG. He clearly doesn't understand how to do current year capitalism.
I think Gabe is an example of how you can stop at absurdly rich and still make your customers happy. The enshittification is only necessary to go beyond absurdly rich.
He's somewhere in the top 300 wealthiest people in the world; forget one-percenter, that's something like top 0.00001%. He definitely has done a lot of nice things for gaming and I hope he continues to do so for the rest of his days but let's not pretend he's not beyond absurdly rich.
> It's stressful having me head squoze
German here. A "Verschlimmbesserung" is something that makes one part better and another part worse. If it only makes things worse you don't need a German word for it, you can just call it worse.
For things that were intended good, but ended up bad, there's an English idiom: the path to hell is paved with good intentions.
Not a German but Duden disagrees with you [0]: "etwas in der Absicht, es zu verbessern, schlechter machen".
[0]: https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern
German here, this is the right definition, trying to improve something but ending up making it worse.
that's not disagreeing at all (american partial german, partial pole)
Both my memory (as a German) and Duden disagree with you.
> etwas in der Absicht, es zu verbessern, schlechter machen > > https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern
"Making somewhere worse with the intention to make it better".
My understanding is that a Verschlimmbesserung stems from a genuine intent to improve something, even though it ultimately has the opposite effect.
I don't remember hearing or using it in this context. It's pretty rare that the goal was to make something worse and if the outcome is only bad, you can just call it bad, right? The word is only needed to communicate that there were good and bad outcomes.
A Verschlimmbesserung of the definition of Verschlimmbesserung.
Just calling it bad does not include the intent of improving it. Verschlimmbesserung does.
> For things that were intended good, but ended up bad, there's an English idiom:
Better is the enemy of good.
Old Italian proverb: "il meglio è nemico del bene"
Shakespeare, King Lear: "Striving to better, oft we mar what's well".
Yeah, no, it means wanting to make things better but ending up making them worse.
[dead]
I usually relate this to people chasing good reviews at work. Maintaining a system and keeping it bug-free doesn't get people promoted.
Doing something large, inventing a bunch of metrics, and showing that you improve on those metrics does.
I would probably abbreviate that to v17g.
Ironically, that would be an example of Verschlimmbesserung.
Not wrong!
What about "worseprovement"
Alternatively "disimprovement".
Via https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=49... and https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=16...
Also misimprovement.
I don't think either of these 2 quite get the point across with the same "wavelengths" getting included.
As a German, I might not have thought of that but would absolutely use it to translate Verschlimmbesserung. Does it sound "normal" enough to native English speakers?
The sibling post's "disimprovement" sounds more natural and has parallel form with pre-existing broadly accepted English words like "disincentive" and "disinfect".
Not sure if that's just me, but "disimprovement" sounds like *removing* an improvement that was previously there…
It's definitely a normal-sounding, memorable word for us native English speakers.
Meanwhile I won't be able to remember that German word longer than it takes me to close this tab. Vershumthingsomething.
It's totally plausible portmanteau. I get the feeling thought that it sounds more marked in English than in German where these kind of mashups are formed more freely.
Thumbs up, let's settle on that translation
I'm Dutch, sounds pretty good to me
I prefer “misprovement”, as in “misfeature”.
We've misunderestimated you.
Isn't the English word more or less "regression"? If you want to coin a new word, how about updowngrade?
"updowngrade", funnily enough, I would understand as having the (IMO misunderstood/wrong) meaning you're trying to give to "Verschlimmbesserung" in your post here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49483585 (making some parts better and some other parts worse.)
That's not what "worseprovement" conveys to me, you can worseprove a single part, intending to make it better, making that same thing actually worse by the very same change.
>attempted improvement that only makes things worse
Unless I'm mistaken, Russian has a wonderful idiom for this: "bear job"
That actually also exists in German! Bärendienst, although it is not 100% the same as Verschlimmbesserung.
Google sez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bear_and_the_Gardener#Idio...
> The story... relates how a solitary gardener encounters a lonely bear and they decide to become companions. One of the bear's duties is to keep the flies off his friend when he takes a nap. Unable to drive off a persistent fly, the bear seizes a paving stone to crush it and kills the gardener as well
> [..]
> The fable has given to the French language the idiom le pavé de l'ours (the bear's paving stone) and to German Bärendienst (a bear's service), both used for doing somebody or something a disservice or bad turn and sometimes for any ill-considered action with an unfortunate result. The Danish and Norwegian word bjørnetjeneste (bear-service) has similar meanings and the idiom also appears in other European languages.
Apparently the source of Russian's, too: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B5...
It‘s „bear service“, and context is slightly different. You do bear service to someone, and Verschlimmbesserung is on something. Both signal intent to do something good, but doing bear service is an act of screwing up while doing that, no prior condition required, and Verschlimmbesserung is the outcome of such attempt applied to something that was ok before.
Can you post the word in Russian?
медвежья услуга
It's actually a verb, "Verschlimmbesserung" is the substantivization.
Base: verschlimmbessern
Present conjugation: I verschlimmbesser[e], you verschlimmbesserst, he/she/it verschlimmbessert, we verschlimmbesser[e]n, (plural-)you verschlimmbessert, they verschlimmbesser[e]n
Past/perfect: verschlimmbessert (e.g. "it got verschlimmbessert")
Imperative: verschlimmbesser[e] (e.g. "don't verschlimmbesser that!")
The [e] at the end is leftover from an older form, in the cases where I omitted it it would sound archaic to a German speaker, but in the other cases it's equivalent or may even sound better. It's also regionally different. The archaic versions kinda sound south German (Swabian, Bavarian).
[ed. made some adjustments]
P.S.: "Verbesserung" means improvement, "Verschlimmerung" means worsening/aggravation. The combined word is understood quite specifically though, not just as a combination of the two. It's *not* a normal case of German "paste words together", that's for nouns (you can do it with the substantivization, e.g. Donaudampfschiffverschlimmbesserungskapitän = "captain of verschlimmbessern the steam ships on the Donau", which makes little sense of course). It's not identical to enshittification either, the latter (to me at least) implies intention; verschlimmbessern you can (and probably often will) do by accident.
Cases apply only to nouns; the present and past perfect are called tenses.
(already edited in)
Would there be a semantic difference between Verschlimmbesserung and Verbesserschlimmung?
無 (the question cannot be answered because it relies on unmet prerequisites)
"Verbesserschlimmung" isn't a word in active use & depending on how it (theoretically) were to enter use, its meaning might vary. It could enter usage with identical meaning, or it could mean the opposite: a change intended to worsen things that made them better. It's a bit like "inflammable".
(Also: this is why I pointed out it's not formed according to the agglutination rules that apply for concatenated nouns in German. For those, the meaning can be logically derived. This is a portmanteau, those don't quite follow rigid rules.)
Does that mean Verbesserschlimmung is "improving things for nothing" because the same can be said of AI.
The painting "restoration" at the end of the article is hilarious! (OMG I hope it's just a joke.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(García_Martínez_and...
Thanks for the link. Well that's pretty sad.
The Reason Foundation has a series of Youtube videos about things that were done with good intentions but ended up making things worse.
https://www.sandpile.org/x86/opc_enc.htm#:~:text=Verschlimmb...
It's not totally clear from the examples given, but I feel like in some cases these changes aren't a genuine effort to improve things. They're just a sort of cycle of changing things to chase fads or look busy.
Office 2003 is a terrible example, office is a product that deliberately makes one part worse on each "upgrade" so that the consumer has a reason to upgrade to another release.
"It is called Verschlimmbesserung: an attempted improvement that only makes things worse."
Hmmm. So, the literal transation would be:
"Verschlimm" - worsen, negative, step back. "Besserung" - improvement, getting better than before.
So, I would translate it as "an effort to improve something but actually making it worse in the process".
There is an old video clip in german about this, actually; I think it was from Loriot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhj1xhv3rZI
Video quality is bad, there are probably better ones but it has english subtitles. The idea here is basically the guy tries to improve something, but in the end kind of causes the whole room to become devastated. That's kind of Verschlimmbesserung: meaning to do well, but failing to do so and causing more harm than good. (Also in the comments people connect this to Friedrich Merz; the guy is really losing popular support by the minute now. Just recently where he was unhappy how real people ask him critical questions.)
„Verschlimbesserung” is what your spouse thinks about each of your improvements to the home automation setup, or, indeed, the whole idea of home automation.
We already have a word for it? "Misfeature"
The opposite is the more interesting word though: hit bug. A bug/mistake/fuckup that turns out to improve the software.
They're not bugs, they're undocumented features
A misfeature is specifically a feature that's just bad, while verschlimmbessern can happen with everything that nobody would call a feature (insert something about xkcd 1172). But yeah, it's pretty close
The modern tech industry is fundamentally broken, the incentive structure is wrong. No one even knows how to ship finished software any more. Everything's a perpetual beta now. It makes me really sad.
I'd say enshitification is a good enough word.
Verschlimmbesserung is not widely used these days in Germany.
I do think it's part of many people's vocabulary. It's a bit informal. And it's not a word you use every day. But it's definitely a word that gets used when the occasion calls for it, just like the related verb "verschlimmbessern."
"Enshittification" isn't the same thing. "Verschlimmbesserung" is when you try to fix a loose connection in a power cord and then no electricity flows at all, or when you try to fix a bad haircut with a trimmer and the haircut ends up looking even worse, etc.
The word is needed a lot today, the English version however not always applicable in more formal contexts.
I'd like to use "Schlimmprovement" for elevated communication.
It's certainly used - not in the top 100, but if the situation calls for it, it's not unexpected.
There's a big difference between enshitification and "Verschlimmbesserung". The latter has the intent of actually improving things, while the first is making things knowingly worse for profit.
Of course it is still widely used.
Define widely used;
I probably haven’t used it once in the last 15 years and have heard it maybe twice.
Source: lifelong German speaker
Maybe you're working with the wrong people? It's uncommon among younger people, but I frequently hear craftsmen say it (who are over 50).
I am also a native German and have heard it a lot in my lifetime. Of course not daily, but it is definitely still used today.
I am even.
Source: Lifelong Prime
> I'd say enshitification is a good enough word.
Enshittification is when the perpetrator intentionally does make a product worse, like locking previously free features behind a paywall with a firmware update, or covers components of an electric device with some goop to make it unrepairable.
Verschlimmbesserung is when the perpetrator has good but ultimately misguided intentions. For example, so middle manager might think that replacing but buttons on a vacuum cleaner with app integration adds value, but ultimately it's replacing something simple, boring and reliable with an overengineered solution that causes more problems than it solves.
There is some overlap between the two: someone could make make a Verschlimmbesserung even though he knows no one wants the change, but he can pad his resume with it. In general I'd say enshittification leans more towards malice, while Verschlimmbesserung leans more towards incompetence.
> Verschlimmbesserung is not widely used these days in Germany.
Yes, it is.
Just from looking at the title, I feel that this talking about AI in general...