Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need

74 pointsposted 5 hours ago
by speckx

32 Comments

dwoldrich

3 hours ago

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.

ThrowawayR2

20 minutes ago

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

nazgulsenpai

an hour ago

TIL squozen is the past participle of squeeze, but only because I first thought hah this guy is making words up. Foiled again!

shaftoe444

36 minutes ago

> It's stressful having me head squoze

alhirzel

3 hours ago

I would probably abbreviate that to v17g.

eqvinox

2 hours ago

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.

schoen

2 hours ago

Cases apply only to nouns; the present and past perfect are called tenses.

eqvinox

2 hours ago

(already edited in)

devindotcom

36 minutes ago

>attempted improvement that only makes things worse

Unless I'm mistaken, Russian has a wonderful idiom for this: "bear job"

remuskaos

31 minutes ago

That actually also exists in German! Bärendienst, although it is not 100% the same as Verschlimmbesserung.

illiac786

14 minutes ago

Can you post the word in Russian?

arjan_sch

2 hours ago

What about "worseprovement"

eqvinox

2 hours ago

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?

ThrowawayR2

16 minutes ago

The sibling post's "disimprovement" sounds more natural and has parallel form with pre-existing broadly accepted English words like "disincentive" and "disinfect".

clbrmbr

an hour ago

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.

inanutshellus

an hour ago

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.

groestl

an hour ago

Thumbs up, let's settle on that translation

arjan_sch

2 hours ago

I'm Dutch, sounds pretty good to me

OptionOfT

2 hours ago

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.

boxed

4 hours ago

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.

dylan604

3 hours ago

They're not bugs, they're undocumented features

looperhacks

2 hours ago

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

Krasnol

4 hours ago

I'd say enshitification is a good enough word.

Verschlimmbesserung is not widely used these days in Germany.

ahf8Aithaex7Nai

3 hours ago

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.

juvvel

2 hours ago

Of course it is still widely used.

icantevenhold

2 hours ago

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

remuskaos

26 minutes ago

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).

looperhacks

2 hours ago

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.

levzettelin

3 hours ago

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