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