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ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
- nyc_data_geek1 5mo ago[flagged]
- deanebarker 5mo agoBut why?
- cmsparks 5mo agoNo idea. ABC bought it and slowly has been shutting down the parts of it. They got rid of the projects page, then laid off all the folks working on it after the election, and now have gotten rid of all of the articles. Fortunately the Github is still up: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight https://github.com/fivethirtyeight
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- fn-mote 5mo ago> Fortunately the Github is still up I need to mirror everything to keep it accessible when they decide to shut this down, too? I loved that site, and referred people to it frequently.
- tstrimple 5mo agoIt turns out "liberal main stream media" was always controlled by capitalists. It was never "left leaning" unless your mind was entirely warped by right wing propaganda.
- markoman 5mo agoNate Silver has some pretty good commentary on it all on his X account (https://x.com/NateSilver538 https://x.com/NateSilver538).
- hightrix 5mo agoA link for those of us without twitter accounts. https://xcancel.com/NateSilver538 https://xcancel.com/NateSilver538
- BeetleB 5mo agoI'm surprised this is news - or perhaps just surprised that there was still some of 538 around ...? ABC officially sunset 538 over a year ago (and laid off most/all of the staff).
- ameliaquining 5mo agoThe new development is that the old articles from when the site was active have been taken offline. Normally you would leave old content online even if you're no longer making more.
- Shalomboy 5mo agoABC has opted to step on Thucydides Trap.
- sparrish 5mo ago[flagged]
- cmsparks 5mo ago538 was actually pretty accurate! They had a good article about how their predictions were much better than you'd expect, but obviously I can't link it anymore because ABC removed it.
- BeetleB 5mo agoThis isn't about Nate's articles (although perhaps those are gone as well).
- fabian2k 5mo agoThe 70:30 prediction against Trump was far better than most. I did see models back then that considered the state polls mostly or entirely uncorrelated, and those produced obviously garbage with 90% or even 99% in favor of Clinton. But in the end people pick on Nate because he really enjoys being an asshole on the internet. It's far more about when he acts as a pundit, not as an expert on statistics.
- softwaredoug 5mo agoPeople consistently have a hard time understanding that 30% probabilities happen all the time.
- Yossarrian22 5mo agoSome say 30% of the time.
- triceratops 5mo agoSurely not all the time.
- Lerc 5mo ago30% of the time it is all of the time.
- woodydesign 5mo agoOh NO, that's probably the best infographic news sites I was keep visiting and learn
- BeetleB 5mo ago538 was sunset over a year ago.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- TurdF3rguson 5mo agoI feel like it was at least 10 years ago
- jmclnx 5mo agoThe old school press people before the 80s would be horrified at this. All this proves is when the press was deregulated to allow one person to own all the media they can afford brought us were we are now.
- lotsofpulp 5mo agoI feel like it proves the opposite. A small entity was able to become a valued source of information, a big entity bought it, but then was unable to do anything with it, since being a “big” media seller does not matter due to the accessibility of the internet.
- flomo 5mo agoNo. The 'old school' hated 538 and polling wonks in general. Back in the 2000s there was a huge push back because this blog guy had numbers going against whatever narrative they were trying spin.
- robtaylor 5mo agoIf you sell out don't expect to control future events.
- jimbob45 5mo ago538 had a really accessible portal that evaluated the quality of pollsters. It made it very easy to know which polls were low-quality and therefore ignorable. It being an election year, it’s possible someone didn’t like their pollster rating. Thankfully, we still have Internet Archive. Edit: nm it was definitely the burrito battle royale bracket. Big burrito couldn’t handle the truth being revealed about their restaurants.
- alisonatwork 5mo agoFifty Plus One kinda does that now: https://fiftyplusone.news/methodology https://fiftyplusone.news/methodology
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago> BTW, I approached ABC about buying back the former FiveThirtyEight IP*, and they said they wouldn't sell at any price because I'd criticized their management of the brand. --Nate Silver (538 founder) ABC seem pretty petty here.
- rurp 5mo agoWow. I have a low opinion of ABC as I said in another post, but this level of pettiness is still surprising to me.
- brookst 5mo agoIt’s basically a fuck you to the shareholders. Hey we’ve got this dead asset someone will pay for but we won’t sell because they were mean to us. Any exec who operates that way should be shown the door ASAP as they are likely doing similar emotional management of other aspects of the business.
- SoftTalker 5mo agoIf they feel it's damaging to have it public, then it could be argued that selling it would be irresponsible. I'm not arguing it is or it isn't, but reputation has value and management of it is part of what shareholders expect.
- brookst 5mo agoBut this isn’t reputation management. This is retribution for past affronts. This action in no way retroactively protects them from what was said.
- jakderrida 5mo agoI think he's just saying the case they would make to avoid being sued for breaching their fiduciary responsibility. Not that it's the actual reason. But Idk.
- rurp 5mo agoIt's wild to me how often I see corporate America both: 1. Spend immense amounts trying to build and improve a brand. 2. Toss well known brands aside as if they are useless. Not that it's always the same company doing both at the same time, but it's crazy 538 was just left to die. It was a very recognizable brand among wonky professionals, a very desirable customer base. It's not as if politics and sports have gotten less relevant in the world over the past decade. ABC's decision to toss this aside is baffling. Much of the 538 alumni seem to be doing well, either independently or as part of a major organization, so I don't think much was lost overall. But I sure empathize with the folks who lost their dream job and ABC looks pretty bad for frittering away a successful business for seemingly no reason. Taking down these articles is nonsensical.
- keeganpoppen 5mo agothis is what the salesforces of the world do to startups every day. it is so painful to watch. billions upon billions wasted for just the stupidest possible reasons.
- herpdyderp 5mo agoOn the other hand, it's nice for the people receiving those paychecks (at least while they're still receiving them).
- forlorn_mammoth 5mo agoat least they aren't inefficient, like governments are. Because as you can clearly see market forces always lead to optimal resource allocations.
- msie 5mo agoLike the billions invested in AI???
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoPretty sure forlorn_mammoth had an implied /s in their post.
- spprashant 5mo ago538 was fun while it lasted. The podcasts were also a good listen. Things got worse after Disney had their first round of layoffs. Their problem was they weren't profitable outside the presidential election years when interest peaked in the general public. 3 out of 4 years only diehard election polling wonks tuned in.
- ajross 5mo agoIn theory corporate ownership was supposed to be the solution to that problem. Deep pockets to buffer through the lean years and maximally exploit the profitable content when the harvest arrives. In practice, of course, corporate bean counting doesn't work on that latency scale. There's always a middle manager seeing fat that can be trimmed today, harvest be damned. But the financial argument was sound.
- jimbokun 5mo agoIf they stayed viable into the heyday of prediction markets and betting apps they should have been printing money.
- sanitycheck 5mo agoIn case you (or others) didn't know, Galen has his own podcast: www.gdpolitics.com It feels a lot like the 538 one, with lots of familiar contributors. The latest ep is a live show with Nate & Clare, might be to your taste.
- rconti 5mo agoTangential: I miss Nate and Maria Konnikova's Risky Business podcast. It only lasted a year (or two?). I expected it would be resurrected outside the Pushkin network, but hasn't happened yet. What I _don't_ miss is listening to podcasts on Pushkin. I had nothing against Malcolm Gladwell, but something about having his voice on every one of the network's very numerous ads became incredibly grating.
- rurp 5mo agoI enjoyed the old 538 podcast and usually like Nate's work but didn't care at all about Risky Business. His cohost was terrible in the episodes I listened too. She managed to do a lot of talking without saying anything interesting or insightful. Gladwell also annoys me, so that didn't help matters.
- scrivna 5mo agoI unsubscribed, got tired of them endlessly droning on about who the mayor of NYC should be. Not relevant to most of the world.
- htrp 5mo agoIf they shut it down, then it's just a strategic decision. If Nate Silver buys it back (for pennies on the dollar) and then makes it successful, it's embarrassing and makes ABC look bad at business.
- rurp 5mo agoThat's kind of already happened though. Nate and Galen have both launched Substack's covering much of what they did at 538. I've also seen at least 4-5 others working elsewhere doing the similar polling/politics/sports work. Maybe that was the logic on ABC's part but it's ridiculously wrong given how much clear market demand there is for the 538 people and content.
- bsder 5mo ago> That's kind of already happened though. It's a world of difference to the political standing of the ABC Vice President between "Nate Silver launched something and made a gazillion dollars" vs "Nate Silver bought FiveThirtyEight back for a song and made a gazillion dollars" even if Nate Silver did the exact same thing. In the second case, the ABC Vice President gets fired because he signed off on the purchase. This is why long copyright is such a terrible idea. With long copyright, there is every incentive to sit on IP and do nothing with it because of political losses. With short copyright, the incentive is to do something quick because the copyright will expire otherwise.
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoYou have a cutely naive view of what gets vice presidents fired.
- toyg 5mo agoI don't understand why Nate doesn't just start SixFortyNine and does it all over again. In the end, what ABC owns is just a name - which was always kinda stupid and even hard to spell - and a bunch of obsolete content.
- daniel-thompson 5mo agohttps://www.natesilver.net/ https://www.natesilver.net/ i was a casual reader of 538 back in the day. his substack feels pretty similar, if smaller in scope.
- hungryhobbit 5mo agoThere's no cool map of how America is likely to vote in the next electioon the new site :(
- alisonatwork 5mo agoYou might enjoy some of the projects here, including a presidential approval map: https://projects.gelliottmorris.com https://projects.gelliottmorris.com Maps for elections generally don't come out till a few months beforehand because there isn't enough polling data to make a meaningful prediction.
- chasd00 5mo agoWas 538 ABC's property during the first Trump election? IIRC they took a pretty big credibility hit after getting that election so wrong and never really recovered.
- shipman05 5mo agoI remember that whole election starting off very poorly for Nate Silver. After reading this book, The Party Decides https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo5921600.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo592160... , he was a big advocate of the idea that the "endorsement race" of state officials and unelected party leaders. There was a whole "Party Decides: Endorsement Tracker" graphic and everything, but Trump securing the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency pretty conclusively showed that theory to be a relic of the past. So the 538 election coverage that year was: - Party endorsements matter more than early polling (they didn't) - Hillary's up so big there's no way Trump can win (he did, and yes I know they didn't actually say that but that's what the layman saw) (ironically the Party Decides thesis seems to have correctly predicted events in the Democratic primary that year)
- bombcar 5mo agoIIRC Nate Silver (or Bronze as the kids called him) was the only poll aggregator to even give Trump "a chance", but he really went overboard afterwards arguing that he got "it right" even though clearly he was wrong.
- triceratops 5mo ago> even though clearly he was wrong. Once again, a failure to understand probabilities. "They gave heads a 50% chance and it came up tails. They're claiming success for giving heads more of a chance than anyone else but they were still wrong". 65-35 probability is squarely in the neighborhood of a literal coin toss.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago> pretty big credibility hit after getting that election so wrong That this is the narrative that survived the election is one of the greatest indictments for our society's ability to engage in critical thinking. The day before the election, the Huffington Post published a hit piece criticising Nate for overrating Trump's odds and inspiring panic. Huffpost predicted a 98.2% chance of Clinton winning, NYT predicted 85%, and Nate's model dared to give her only a 65% chance of winning. Then the election happens, Trump wins, and the credible figure who gave him the highest odds is now lambasted from the other direction. He was so wrong to give Trump a chance that the mainstream media were publishing articles about it, and he was so wrong to not give Trump a 100% chance that it ruined his reputation. The moral: you literally can't win, because people are too fucking stupid to comprehend probability, period. 538 made thousands of forecasts of events they predicted to happen 30% of the time, and those events happened 29% of the time in actuality. Does that mean they got it wrong every single one of those times a 30% event actually happened? For a forecaster to be 'correct', is it necessary for events forecasted at 30% to never happen?
- culi 5mo agoReally sad to see some of the best visualizations I've ever seen in my life being taken down. I've easily spent hours exploring playing with their gun deaths visualization, p-hacking piece, gut microbiome explorable explainer and many others. Guess we better back up their GitHub repos before that gets taken down as well https://github.com/fivethirtyeight https://github.com/fivethirtyeight
- The_Blade 5mo agothey took down the burrito bracket, it must be resurrected when i lived in SF i found al pastor at Tacqueria Cancun messianic
- toomanyrichies 5mo agoTheir carnitas super taco was life-changing for me. Perfectly-cooked meat, generous helpings of avocado and sour cream. It was too big to fold at first, I had to eat it down to a manageable size with a fork before I could pick it up. Still chasing that dragon to this day.
- justinclift 5mo agoLooks like just 30 repos: https://github.com/orgs/fivethirtyeight/repositories?type=source https://github.com/orgs/fivethirtyeight/repositories?type=so...
- liveoneggs 5mo agoMajor news sites can just lean into mathwashing their political opinions pages and call it any random number they like.
- booleandilemma 5mo ago[flagged]
- nozzlegear 5mo ago[flagged]
- sharts 5mo agoHow did they do that? How do you lose access to your own website?
- cobertos 5mo agoThey sold it a while ago
- hedora 5mo agoThis is another sad step towards denying that there's a science to conducting and interpreting scientifically accurate polls, presumably in the run up for the unfair elections we're holding now and this November. The first time I noticed this trend was during one of the W elections. The exit polls for the whole country were spot on except in some republican controlled districts in swing states. In all the districts with a discrepancy, the polls showed a much stronger democratic turnout than the vote tallies. All the districts in question had electronic voting without paper trails. I guess some combination of those factors makes exit polls unreliable. /s That pattern has repeated for most presidential elections since about 2004, and always indicate systematic tampering that caused official vote tallies to favor republicans more than the exit polls did. The effect is only seen in places where the officials were republican, where the difference was likely to matter and where recounts were impossible. I'll miss 538. Here's an epitaph: > Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -1984 by George Orwell.
- dredmorbius 5mo agoWayback Machine / Internet Archive does have (some?) content: <https://web.archive.org/web/20250305183642/https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250305183642/https://projects....> NB: one of my gripes about current / contemporary content management / publishing systems is that almost all of them make it really hard to find either a specific article or a particular day's version of a site. NB2: I realise writing the above that HN is an exceptionally welcome exception to that rule, with its "past" link (<https://news.ycombinator.com/front https://news.ycombinator.com/front>), which not only exists but is prominently placed (top bar, 3rd link of 8 content-based links) on the site.
- DonHopkins 5mo agoWhat were the odds of ABC News taking all FiveThirtyEight articles offline? I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot poll.
- NordStreamYacht 5mo agoNot all acquisitions are for direct financial profit. Sometimes companies acquire upcoming competitors specifically to shut them down so that existing cash cow product lines can continue.
- e40 5mo agoThat's not what this was.
- madrox 5mo agoABC is a strange place. I'll never forget working at Disney around 2008ish and attending a meeting with an ABC exec. They said to my boss, "I know you don't want to believe this because you're so close to it, but the internet is a fad."
- casefields 5mo agoAt first glance that’s absurd, but if AI really does kills social media with dead internet theory then they will have been right!
- beart 5mo agoI was shocked when ABC laid off Clare Malone years back. It seemed incredibly short sited and sudden, to fire a public figure without ceremony or reason. It marked, at least to me, a beginning decline in quality.
- patresh 5mo agoWhere did you all go to once FiveThirtyEight died down? I occasionally read articles on Nate Silver's substack but I'm still missing the breadth of 538conbined with the trademark data-driven analysis.
- shimman 5mo agoI started doing actual politics rather than simply consuming it. It's more fun trust me.
- alisonatwork 5mo agoI highly recommend G Elliott Morris' blog Strength in Numbers. He exists more in conversation with political science researchers and commercial polling professionals which makes his reporting feel a lot deeper and more interesting than the back of the envelope hot takes a bunch of other pundits try to sell as data journalism these days. Strength in Numbers is very US politics centric, but Elliott also works with Mary Radcliffe on Fifty Plus One. That's a new hub for raw polling data (and averages) but they also do some broader polling roundup style stories that have a 538 feel. David Nir of the Downballot is pretty good too if you are looking for information on the smaller races. Outside of the SiN extended universe, Marist have a podcast called Poll Hub which is very light and fun and reminiscent of the cuddliest 538 podcasts before they started getting that weird contrarian podcast bro energy. I've trialed a bunch of other sites since 538 went away and also checked in on the other alumni, but none of it outside of SiN-and-friends or the Marist quite hit for me.
- paulschreiber 5mo agoWhat's weird is that they are still pointing at the Automattic (WordPress VIP) IP address and redirecting via a WP plugin. So the content is likely still there.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- rldjbpin 5mo agofinally one of the things from the past i could say inspired me, like in the obituaries made by the vets in other posts! while the content had zero relevance to my daily life, the data storytelling was quite inspiring during the time i was deciding which career to pursue. i went through their github as pointed out by others, but did not see how they would actually make the visualisations. anybody can guide me in the right direction before that acc also get pulled off?