Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need | Hacker News Reader

Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need

geekyschmidt.com

178 pointsspeckx120 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!

It is not, it is "squeezed". This is not an irregular verb.

I looked 'squeeze' up in the (paywalled) Oxford English Dictionary [0]. The are numerous variant forms including 'squoze' and 'squozen':

"Also 1600s squeez, squeaze, squease, squese, 1600s–1700s squeese. Also with dialect preterite and past participle 1800s– squoze, past participle 1800s squozen."

The OED cites quotations from the 1930s, 1870s, and 1860s that include 'squoze' and 'squozen', for example ‘Orange?’ repeated Waitress No. 1. ‘Do you want it squoze?’ in the Baltimore Sun, 1 Sep 1931.

[0] https://www.oed.com/dictionary/squeeze_v?tab=forms#21076314

> It's stressful having me head squoze

Gabe Newell has an $11bn net worth so he hasn't exactly been not squeezing.

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.

I think there’s two separate things here that you seem to be conflating - absurdly rich and unethical. I’d argue Newell is mostly the former; though many or most billionaires align on both those metrics.

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.

Does he even have his own cryptocurrency?

(don't answer that, it does exist because people make shitcoins for everything: https://phantom.com/tokens/solana/4CF8Ek5DEiYtP1YuqomDdhkeSc...)

Is Coca Cola squeezing me, too?

Yes? Read about their water rights lobbying and lobbying against plastic recycling regulations. Our descendents have to deal with Coca Cola’s externalities. You can’t see these second order effects immediately, which is understandable, but coca cola is massively extractive.

I think his company has created far more value and goodwill than his networth indicates. True juicers like Bezos and Musk are different.

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.

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.

Why do you change something if not to make it better, though? Trying to improve things is implicit.

Of course there's many reasons to make something worse intentionally. Revenge for example.

The point of Verschlimmbesserung is to show your good intentions to improve something failed.

Improvement = Verbesserung

Worsening = Verschlimmerung

Worsening because you tried to improve = Verschlimmbesserung

Ask your local carpenter or plumber how many of their jobs have to do with people trying to fix a damage and make it worse

Worsen it from the perspective of the judge, not from the person doing it.

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)

It is a different meaning from that in the parent comment by OroPla.

Yes, that's the correct definition.

I still agree with parent’s definition more because it also covers the ironic, sarcastic case, as well as the inherent ambiguity of the word ‘besser’. Plainly put, ‘better’ for who?

If you just say it as a logical series of making it worse while making it better you miss that the intention of the ‘better’ is the first place wasn’t even the intention to make it better for the user.

But you rarely only worsen it in every direction.

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".

> 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".

It's kind of like the road to hell, which is famously paved with good intentions.

> Better is the enemy of good.

That's not the same at all. The idea there is that if you try to make the best, you will stop advancing towards good, not that you will worsen it.

Yeah, no, it means wanting to make things better but ending up making them worse.

As opposed to Vershittification, the perfect union of terms from the two languages.

Verscheißifizierung

No, just no.

I think that's a subtle Verschlimmbesserung of the original definition.

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!

People equate work with value.

That's largely a function of incentives.

If a startup could have been a 100 line PHP script, instead of 50 microservices, then you wouldn't be able to work on it for the next 10 years, and hire 5 of your buds from school.

"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.)

What about "worseprovement"

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?

I'm Dutch, sounds pretty good to me

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.

Thumbs up, let's settle on that translation

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.

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…

An improvement isn't all or nothing, it can be incremental. The dis- prefix only indicates that the increment is negative in this case.

I'm darn sure that in time the original German pronounciation would be lost and you'd hear something comparable to reading Straße as "Strabe".

Probably it would become "verskimbeserong".

It doesn't sound normal. "worse-" doesn't fit as a replacement for the "im-" prefix, because the "se" ending doesn't flow well into the plosive "prov".

"disimprove" works much better.

The similar word "unimproved" implies you did nothing to make it better, "disimproved" implies you actively made it worse.

But this is still just effectively adding "not" to the word. If you must join two words that are the antonyms of each other (like verbessern and verschlimmern), the closest match I can think of is the vulgar pun "fuxed", a blend of "fixed" (repaired) and "fucked" (broke). https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Fuxed

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.

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.

It's close enough and has been already in use. A regression of features quality - for example.

There's no reason to coin a new term at all, nor chasing this idea of using long German word as a replacement.

It works, but regression is broader. If I'm not mistaken, a regression can also happen without human intervention. Verschlimmbesserung is active. Someone actually tried something and made it worse.

I prefer “misprovement”, as in “misfeature”.

We've misunderestimated you.

How about "bloat". Something that doesn't need to be there, and it would be better if it wasn't, but it was typically added with some misguided "good intentions". Bloat.

This also applies to changing something. If it was perfect, and you changed it, and now it's not perfect anymore, then the work itself didn't need to happen, and was therefore bloat.

Most work is bloat. But we have tied continued existence to work (mostly -- we mistake work for value), so we've made infinite bloating appear mandatory.

As an aside, most of the human psychology (assumptions, beliefs etc.) is also bloat, and similarly benefits from debloating.

Bloat refers to quantitative apects like increased cpu/ram/storage requirements.

Article discusses qualitative aspects a la "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".

Interesting. By this definition, a poorly chosen algorithm is also "bloat", which doesn't seem right to me.

I see bloat mostly as "unnecessary dependencies." Things which, if you removed them, the product would improve.

e.g. importing a whole library for what could have been a simple function.

If something justifies its "weight", then it's not bloat. It's functional.

But there's also "feature bloat." If a feature or change doesn't need to exist, or makes things worse, then it's bloat. If you removed it, the project would improve.

“wrongbetterment”

Similar, when you get an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time, I've proposed "bonalty": bonus + penalty.

„Verschlimbesserung” is what your spouse thinks about each of your improvements to the home automation setup, or, indeed, the whole idea of home automation.

>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 present in both Polish and Czech as well but rarely used

Can you post the word in Russian?

медвежья услуга

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.

"Хотели как лучше, а получилось как всегда."

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.

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.)

(German) Words do not work like that. First, it's called 'schlimmer', so -> "Verbesserschlimmerung". Second "schlimm" is positiv, while "besser" is the comparativ, so you need to swap these too: "schlimmer" and "gut".

Also the genesis of the word works like this: "besser" -> "bessern" -> "verbessern" -> "verschlimmbessern" -> "Verschlimmbesserung" (better -> becoming better -> making better -> making better towards a worse state -> same, but as noun) So you append to the beginning, while keeping the existing prefix. If you want to end up with "worse" at the end, you need to start with it too. "schlecht" -> "verschlechtern" -> ??? But then "gut" doesn't fit, because that implies an absolute, that "schlimm" does not.

Note, that "schlimm" does not plainly mean "bad", that's "schlecht". It also contains the notion of pity, guilt and impotence. That doesn't really exist for the opposite.

In the age of LLMs it is important to have vocabulary that survives when taken out of context - German nouns fit that very well. In my own project I decided to use phrases of two words (often with a hyphen) for all technical terms (terms that have special meaning in my project).

And by the way I also started using Auftragstaktik as an anchor for a methodology of writing plans and prompts.

The Reason Foundation has a series of Youtube videos about things that were done with good intentions but ended up making things worse.

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.

Funny that you missed it, the story was everywhere back in the day

https://www.sandpile.org/x86/opc_enc.htm#:~:text=Verschlimmb...

Glorious word to describe just about every iOS update ever.

The Matrix was right. Civilization peaked at Skeumorphism. Pure unfiltered soul.

Does that mean Verbesserschlimmung is "improving things for nothing" because the same can be said of AI.

Love it. The German language has words for almost anything; especially if it’s cynical.

I’m told that’s because the language is designed to synthesize words. I wouldn’t know. I don’t speak German (but I speak English, which has German roots).

I once looked at an etymology diagram, and was surprised to see Low German is the root for a whole shitton of modern languages. I think that may be because it was a trade language.

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.

That's why it specifies 2003, that's about the point when Office had all the features and usability one needs. The Office versions after that are worse.

It's not even funny how often that word sounds in my head these days

Or in English: "misfeature".

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

Like combos in Street Fighter II. Also a "hit bug" in a different sense, as it's an unintended effect of how characters strike each other in game.

Just from looking at the title, I feel that this talking about AI in general...

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.

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

I am even.

Source: Lifelong Prime

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

I hear it often. Especially from my wife. Criticising my repairs.

How about Verscheisserung / Verschisserung?

I do like the sound of Verscheissification.

As Picard said: Enshitify! (Apologies to my Trekkie friends.)

> Verscheisserung

That already means "prank".

> Verschisserung

"Schisser" means coward.

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