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Comments (47)

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  OroPla
  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.
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  dwoldrich
  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.
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  alhirzel
  I would probably abbreviate that to v17g.
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  arjan_sch
  What about "worseprovement"
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  eqvinox
  It's actually a verb, "Verschlimmbesserung" is the substantivization.Base: verschlimmbessernPresent conjugation: I verschlimmbesser[e], you verschlimmbesserst, he/she/it verschlimmbessert, we verschlimmbesser[e]n, (plural-)you verschlimmbessert, they verschlimmbesser[e]nPast/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.
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  jakzurr
  The painting "restoration" at the end of the article is hilarious! (OMG I hope it's just a joke.)
• OptionOfT
  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.
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  devindotcom
  >attempted improvement that only makes things worseUnless I'm mistaken, Russian has a wonderful idiom for this: "bear job"
• 6c696e7578
  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.
• WesolyKubeczek
  „Verschlimbesserung” is what your spouse thinks about each of your improvements to the home automation setup, or, indeed, the whole idea of home automation.
• 345t36g5g35gt5
  https://www.sandpile.org/x86/opc_enc.htm#:~:text=Verschlimmb...
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  boxed
  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.
• grishka
  [dead]
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  Krasnol
  I'd say enshitification is a good enough word.Verschlimmbesserung is not widely used these days in Germany.
• levzettelin
  Just from looking at the title, I feel that this talking about AI in general...