> It's stressful having me head squoze

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

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".

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

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

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

My understanding is that a Verschlimmbesserung stems from a genuine intent to improve something, even though it ultimately has the opposite effect.

Ironically, that would be an example of Verschlimmbesserung.

They're not bugs, they're undocumented features

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.

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.

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.

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

Alternatively "disimprovement".

Via https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=49... and https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewUnsolvedquery.php?idThread=16...

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 prefer “misprovement”, as in “misfeature”.

Isn't the English word more or less "regression"? If you want to coin a new word, how about updowngrade?

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

Can you post the word in Russian?

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

Would there be a semantic difference between Verschlimmbesserung and Verbesserschlimmung?

German here, this is the right definition, trying to improve something but ending up making it worse.

> 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 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.

Of course it is still widely used.

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.

Thumbs up, let's settle on that translation

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.

We've misunderestimated you.

медвежья услуга

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.)

I'm Dutch, sounds pretty good to me

"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 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.

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...

(already edited in)

Also misimprovement.

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

A Verschlimmbesserung of the definition of Verschlimmbesserung.

Just calling it bad does not include the intent of improving it. Verschlimmbesserung does.

Thanks for the link. Well that's pretty sad.

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 don't think either of these 2 quite get the point across with the same "wavelengths" getting included.

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 even.

Source: Lifelong Prime

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.

that's not disagreeing at all (american partial german, partial pole)

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.

Not wrong!

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.

Not sure if that's just me, but "disimprovement" sounds like *removing* an improvement that was previously there…