15 ms·

Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

457 points by 7777777phil 5mo ago

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553
dionian 5mo ago
Call me a skeptic, but it's certainly odd all the errors always lean to one side. Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press. > What happened in 2024 isn’t something I’d have scripted, though. Basically, their new election model was literally broken, continuing to show Joe Biden virtually tied with Trump even after his disastrous debate. (Evidently because Morris’s design for it had been overcomplicated. These models are hard to design, by the way.)
- tkzed49 5mo ago
  Why would a left-leaning press engineer errors predicting the victory of the left? Wouldn't this lull supporters of the Democrats into a false sense of security and enable Republican wins?
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - guywithahat 5mo ago
    I think it's more of a systemic issue than top-down manipulation. Like, as a hypothetical, they're disregarding some people as being extremist when in reality they have reasonable, representative views. This produces biased results, and people who agree with the results share them because it supports their world view. The shares and new revenue reinforce the companies decision to produce biased reports, and the effect is politicians read these popular reports thinking they're accurate and make policy decisions around them, when in reality they're just a political wish-list.
- LanceH 5mo ago
  It seems calling a state purple is just using a synonym for red.
- Octoth0rpe 5mo ago
  > Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press. What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.
  - CGMthrowaway 5mo ago
    >cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing
    - rc_kas 5mo ago
      Remember when Net Nuetrality was the priority of hackernews and slashdot and basically all people in tech. Now it's a "leftist policy". We live in crazy times. Overton window has definitely shifted to the right. Beign a normal person who values science is now considered "leftist". Its nuts.
      - Terr_ 5mo ago
        There's also a bloc that's been working to try to retroactively redefine what "Net Neutrality" means. Instead of the usual stuff like "consumers have rights" or "ISP monopolies are bad" or "utilities should just provide the product and not spy and manipulate", they want it to mean something closer to "no online community can moderate itself." And that's the charitable version. The worse version involves rank hypocrisy and selective enforcement, where large social "networks" must be "neutral" to literal nazis, while somehow it's also OK to permaban for insulting Dear Leader.
      - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
        The set of people who are "basically all people in tech" has changed a lot since then for a variety of reasons; it's not surprising that any given political issue from a decade ago might not have the same resonance today.
- jdlshore 5mo ago
  Are you sure you aren’t experiencing selection bias? The article only mentions one modeling error (the one you quoted), so “all the errors” must be the ones you’ve noticed elsewhere.
- convolvatron 5mo ago
  its this really what we're left with, people sharing their skepticism? without any dint of rationale, just stories about how these obviously bad people did all this stuff that everyone knows. I'm not going to defend Silver's predictions, but what was really refreshing about his work was some lovely diagrams, and real intent behind exposing his methodology. it was never 'trust me I'm the expert', but 'wow, this is hard and these are the problems and this is how I tried to deal with them'
- jandrese 5mo ago
  > leftward trend of the mainstream press Oh yeah, venerable institutions like the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the like? Or maybe you mean the TV news organizations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar, or Hearst? Or maybe cable news organizations like CNN or Fox News? The narrative of the "liberal media" is so out of date it makes you look out of touch. The mainstream media is captured by billionaire interests and has been so for years now.
- burnte 5mo ago
  > Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press. What? Media in the USA has staggered to the right over the past ten years. The only reason it was called liberal before that was because one party used facts and data and the other preferred to rig the system against the common people. While Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" it's joke only in that the conservative viewpoint today seems focused on imaginary problems and denying the existence of real ones.
  - joshstrange 5mo ago
    > Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" Video (queued up): https://youtu.be/IJ-a2KeyCAY?t=270 https://youtu.be/IJ-a2KeyCAY?t=270 It's always pretty depressing to go back and watch this or old Colbert Report episodes and realize how parts are incredibly "evergreen", sometimes you don't even need to change out the names.
- rvba 5mo ago
  Maybe there were no errors and a certain techbro helped with the counting machines so right wing could win?
ilamont 5mo ago
A Pew study of a random sample of Internet links conducted in October 2023 found significant “link rot”: almost 40 percent of links that had been active 10 years earlier were broken. And that’s probably an underestimate: the study was based on the Common Crawl web archive (the same one that AI labs use to train their models), which is quite comprehensive but probably contains some bias toward more prominent sites. "Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage. If we're talking about news sites, or commentary, or blogs, or magazines, or newspapers, or other publishers, the number of dead links will be far higher. Those are the types of sites that are likely to fail, be acquired, get migrated, or become paywalled. I worked as a technology journalist for years starting in the late 90s. I did a lot of freelance work as well, and almost nothing survives online. There were media brands that were shut down, content migrated to another site, the CMS was migrated from Drupal to Wordpress to something else, there were two or three acquisitions, and so on. Last week, I checked some articles that I worked on between 3 and 10 years ago and they were either 404s or paywalled. When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them. My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.
- toomuchtodo 5mo ago
  https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/introducing-vanishing-culture-a-new-book-on-the-loss-of-our-digital-memory/ https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/introducing-vanishing-cu... https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026 https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026 (when able, please consider donating to the Internet Archive; they are the durable, long term storage system of last resort) > Yes, you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin. The election models and polling averages are here, and new-and-improved versions of the sports models (PELE, ELWAY, COOPER) are gradually returning too.2 Galen Druke, Clare Malone and I have even been getting the old podcast crew back together for live shows. With regards to: > When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them. May I suggest: https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/ https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/ You can upload them all as a single item, or as individual items per piece and asking IA Patron Services to create a collection for you. > My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point. Drop links, and they will be queued for crawling, if not already archived. If you would like to self serve, https://web.archive.org/save https://web.archive.org/save
SilverElfin 5mo ago
It’s what happened to Star Wars. Figures.
- superfrank 5mo ago
  How so? To me it seems like the exact opposite of what's happened with Star Wars in the last 20 years. 538 was purchased and then left to wither and die where as Disney seems intent on squeezing every last penny from the Star Wars franchise by using the IP as much as possible
  - SilverElfin 5mo ago
    Disney removed a lot of the earlier IP from the official Star Wars storyline shortly after acquiring it. That IP was much better than the complete mess and politicization of Star Wars that happened in the sequels. Sure they are trying to squeeze money out of it - and maybe some of the TV shows are tolerable - but they killed the brand and its best content in the process.
    - wredcoll 5mo ago
      Good point, Star Wars was famously not about politics. Very apolitical.
      - teddyh 5mo ago
        The politics of the original trilogy Star Wars was essentially “dictators and fascists with big armies are bad”. It was naïve and simplistic; a simple storytelling device, nothing more. There was no conscious choice behind it. If it had been made 40 years earlier, the enemies would have been savage indigenous people, as was the style at the time. The politics of modern Star Wars are… specific. Pointed. Winking at the camera. I suspect they may not age well.
        hobofan 5mo ago
        The Viet Cong parallels in the original Star Wars about as much "winking at the camera" as current Star Wars is to current politics.
divbzero 5mo ago
Some of Disney’s most valuable properties—ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars—were acquired. FiveThirtyEight may be smaller, but it should be in Disney’s self-interest to set things right and earn a reputation for being a good home for acquisitions.
- slg 5mo ago
  > ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars And all of those have declined in reputation since their acquisition or soon after.
  - famouswaffles 5mo ago
    That's not remotely true. Disney bought ESPN in 1996, Marvel in 2009 (literally had 2 movies released here and one of them flopped) and Pixar in 2006. For Pixar, they and Disney were joined at the hip even before acquisition. Besides distribution rights, Disney had full sequel rights to almost all of Pixar's catalogue at the time. Disney could have made a sequel to Finding Nemo, The Incredibles etc even without Pixar's blessing or involvement. There is quite literally no Pixar without Disney. Marvel? Their most successful years were under Disney. ESPN did not become the media empire you know it as until well after Disney's acquisition either.
    - slg 5mo ago
      I specifically said reputation. Disney has a history of buying properties and squeezing every last dollar out of them until nothing is left but a husk of what they were at their peak. Disney certainly got their money’s worth out of those purchases. I’m not denying that. But the reputation of all of them has been on a steep decline even if there were temporary spikes after the acquisition. I’ll grant you that “soon after” might have been a stretch for ESPN, but it’s obviously true for the others. Almost all of Pixar’s most enduring films had their start before Disney bought the company. The same is true with Marvel. Sure, Disney’s fanfare might have played before the Avengers films, but those movies were the brainchild of Kevin Fiege, who was already in charge before the Disney purchase. You can maybe claim Disney has a good eye for finding companies on an upward trajectory, but these are all examples of Disney management’s failure to be a long-term steward of their acquisitions.
chao- 5mo ago
>The Times was also in the midst of a leadership transition, and new management tends to want to move on from the old regime’s pet projects, even if they were successful. Learning about B2B sales over the years, the size of this leadership-change factor has been among the most eye-opening (and among the most disappointing). It cuts both ways: You can have a successful pilot that doesn't proceed because this-or-that VP was replaced, and to show off their bold new direction, the new VP cancels almost everything novel the previous person started. Or you can reach out just at the moment the new guy or gal comes in, right when they're looking for the pieces of their bold new direction, and you become part of that. I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy. Alas. At least I have been fortunate enough to experience both directions in quantities that roughly balance out.
- nostrademons 5mo ago
  > I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy. My experience is that it's the opposite: the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy. At more successful companies, it basically doesn't matter what the executives do, because the company's moat is so big that it can tolerate grotesque mismanagement and still make money. (This is the converse of the old aphorism "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."). Executives seem extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars and yet nothing they do matters, and so they're intent on leaving their mark. Thus, they cancel all the pet projects of the past management, instill their own ideas, and boldly take the company in a new direction. Except not really, because the fundamental parts of the business that make it work are all handled by people 8 levels down in the org chart whose job functions are considered common sense by everybody and never really up for discussion. At least, this was my experience at Google, which is perhaps the best money-making machine ever invented and yet is grotesquely mismanaged by mid-level VPs that cancel every promising new product that comes out, only to start their own initiatives that themselves get canceled by their successors.
nashashmi 5mo ago
> Founder Nate Silver left in 2023, taking the rights to his forecasting model with him to his website Silver Bulletin.[7][8][9] The site's new owner, Disney, hired G. Elliott Morris to develop a new model.[7][8] On September 18, 2023, the original website domain at fivethirtyeight.com was closed, with web traffic becoming redirected to ABC News pages, and its logo was replaced, with the name 538 used instead of FiveThirtyEight.[2] On March 5, 2025, 538 was shut down by ABC News and its staff were laid off.[10] On May 15, 2026, ABC redirected thousands of archived 538 articles to the politics section of their news website, making them inaccessible. From Wikipedia.
cm2012 5mo ago
What a delightfully educational article on how the corporate world works
- doctorpangloss 5mo ago
  it was super interesting. My gut was like, jesus christ, if you don't live in New York City, seriously, absolutely nobody gives a single flying fuck about any of this stuff!
simonw 5mo ago
In situations like this I always wonder if there's a decision maker somewhere in the pipeline who just has values and a mental model of the world that's entirely foreign to me - for whom the idea of deleting a decade+ of content from the web doesn't strike them as bad in the slightest.
- outside1234 5mo ago
  I would actually say that for most business people this is all "about numbers" and aren't in the slightest worried about deleting something. This is why efforts like Internet Archive and others are so important. Whatever you think of 538, it _is_ history, and in this digital world it needs to be preserved.
- panda888888 5mo ago
  I can easily see the argument that once an election is over, people don't read the content anymore. Granted, storage is cheap so this is kinda silly, but I bet the old articles weren't getting very much traffic.
legitster 5mo ago
> The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it. There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company. At one point, other senior staffers and I basically begged Disney to turn on a paywall, figuring this could provide some security, and were told, essentially, that it just wasn’t worth Disney’s bandwidth to figure out the mechanics of one. I cannot tell you how much of my professional career I have seen this play out again and again and again. There is an "executive class" in this country that has never had a real job or done real work. They were born to privilege, they went to elite schools, got their first check from a major consultancy, and then spend their whole career bouncing from C-suite to C-suite. They stare at slides all day, occasionally make a meaningful decision, and more or less spend their time insulating themselves from failure. This may not describe everyone in charge at every major company, but it describes enough to explain why everything in our economy just feels like it's piggybacking off of a handful of actually good businesses.
- forshaper 5mo ago
  Insulation in our society has gone all the way up and down.
- underlipton 5mo ago
  It's not the full story, but it's certainly a large part of it. I'll chime in tangentially with another large part: the disproportionate share of both asset and liquid wealth held by people who are some combination of a) Baby Boomers, b) in the top percentiles of wealth/income, c) politically- or socially-connected. As you say, it's not all of them, but enough of them. At the confluence of the two groups is a desire not to invest in potentially risky ventures, or to spend on consumption, but instead to put as much money as possible into a narrow band of low-risk, often passive investments, and to pull every lever possible to protect those investments, even when they become outmoded in some regard and the income stream or economic activity that supports their high (growing) valuation dries up. Supporting this paradigm (ostensibly so that seniors don't die in poverty, so that strategically-important businesses and ventures are backstopped, etc., but, crucially, to the detriment of all other concerns) means an erosion of a sort of "constructive inefficiency": "wasted" spending on ventures that might not work out, on employees who are not the best and most productive, on niche services and products, which altogether represent a massive share of potential economic activity that is much better at involving and supporting a diverse population with diverse needs and diverse skill sets that perhaps have not yet found the correct outlet to produce maximal value. Your C-suite goons and my rich, highly networked seniors don't care about the potential of a paradigm shift to support and enable short-term losers, though. They just want to pile into the sure-thing of your "actually good businesses" (which, in many cases, aren't actually that good).
ninth_ant 5mo ago
> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me. He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want, but regardless I had zero interest in reading any of their predictions or analyses after that. Not even mad, just that to my experience they had one job and they didn’t fulfill it at the most important time. They went from appearing insightful to just one opinion amongst so many others.
- shawabawa3 5mo ago
  Because they said trump only had a 30% chance to win? What if they had said 49%? Would that have made their prediction worthless?
  - bellowsgulch 5mo ago
    I mean everyone said he had a snowball’s chance in hell and then we ended up with him for two terms because the Democrats can’t stop fighting over the worse possible candidates to back that no one is asking for.
    - palata 5mo ago
      I find it interesting to blame it on the democrats. We ended up with him because enough people voted for him.
      - kjkjadksj 5mo ago
        The blame is put on democrats because when they lose its because they don’t turn out and when they win its because they do. It is quite simple really. Republicans are far more reliable voters. You can look at vote totals and see this pattern. Massive delta for democrats election over election and usually half that delta for republicans.
carlcortright 5mo ago
This is quite sad.
grebc 5mo ago
No wonder Disney won’t bother giving him his domain back.
sbxfree 5mo ago
It feels a little disingenuous to call out your opponent's model failures when Silver's model on Live Election Night also completely bugged out showing Kamala as more favored as she lost state after state: https://web.archive.org/web/20241109030935/https://www.thedailybeast.com/nate-silver-gives-up-on-his-prediction-model-in-middle-of-election-night/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241109030935/https://www.theda...
jerlam 5mo ago
RIP 538's burrito bracket from 2014
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Traster 5mo ago
The more I read about how big businesses operate the more I think it resembles the weather. There's no intelligence in there, it's just random fluctuations. FiveThirtyEight never made any sense at Disney and seems to have been passed around there more like a trinket than a decades work of dozens of people.
- Eric_WVGG 5mo ago
  One of the most frustrating things about getting older — besides all the fun stuff that happens to your knees and hair — is the fact that younger generations just take what has been normal their whole lives and say “yes this is the normal state of affairs.” We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc. Disney should never have been allowed to buy 538 in the first place. ABC, possibly…? But Disney shouldn't be allowed to own ABC!! (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!) The state we’re in is not normal and it wasn’t necessary and we don’t have to just live with it if we don’t want to.
  - satiric 5mo ago
    Interesting in learning more - what bill is this that was passed by Clinton?
    - ascagnel_ 5mo ago
      The Telecommunications Act of 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 It passed with support from both parties in both the House and Senate.
  - ascagnel_ 5mo ago
    > (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!) I would argue Clinton's presidency moved the Democrats from a center-left party to a center-right party, given its platform of welfare reform and free trade at the expense of labor rights and the social safety net.
panda888888 5mo ago
Am I the only one who finds this whole blog post to be super unprofessional? I agree it's sad that the content is gone, but airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth (assuming you're not a whistleblower talking about illegal activity or something like that). I feel bad for Nate Silver, but business is business. I guess he had to learn that lesson the hard way.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
  > airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth Absolutely not. Creating a culture where employees are expected to be silent about their (mis)treatment by wealthy owners is only favorable, to, well, wealthy owners. Business is business, so why is it unprofessional to point out they're bad at business?
  - panda888888 5mo ago
    I view Nate as basically acting like a sore loser here, which is why I find it unprofessional. I'm not arguing that we should clamp down on free speech or anything like that. If a company wants to buy another company and sunset it, that's a normal business practice. I get that it's disappointing, but in no way is this "mistreatment." At least to me, this is a perfectly normal business situation that doesn't merit this level of complaining. It reads as an ex-employee being petty.
    - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
      Funny, this story reads as ABC/Disney being petty to me. They were made a business offer to repurchase an IP that is worth nothing to them, and are instead choosing to blackhole any value it has and burn it to the ground because somebody with an ego has a personal grievance over Disney having been criticised for their management of the brand in the past. If that's what professional conduct entails in your eyes, I don't suppose there will be any agreement in our views.
      - 5mo ago
pupppet 5mo ago
Easy to go after Disney for this, but did Nate have to sell to ESPN to begin with? I've been burned too many times subscribing to services that go to shit because the owner wanted their payday. Let's stop (only) blaming the buyer.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
  He literally said he made the wrong choice by choosing ESPN, so he's in agreement with you.
  - pupppet 5mo ago
    The focus of the stories making the rounds about this are not about Nate having made some mistake, they're about big bad Disney deleting someone's work (which yes is also true).
  - panda888888 5mo ago
    Yes, but he's failing to see the big picture. Selling any small company to any big company leads to this risk. To hold water, his argument should be: "we shouldn't have sold the business at all," not "we shouldn't have sold to ESPN." I personally don't love ESPN/Disney/ABC, but basically all major corporations that make acquisitions do this. Google does it all the time. It's very clearly a known risk when you sell a startup. I don't have much sympathy.
    - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
      It wouldn't have been a business to begin with if he didn't sell it. At the time, it was just a blog driving a modest amount of ad revenue. Partnering with bigger outfits allowed him to hire staff and cover more ground, something that he could never do without outside investment. He has since returned to blogging, which to my understanding drives enough revenue for himself and exactly one assistant. I replied to your comment, and now you've replied to two other threads I've commented in reiterating that Nate is a sore loser who deserves what he got and he should have expected this. To be honest, it sounds like you have some kind of personal grievance with him. His post doesn't come off like he wasn't expecting this outcome, or that it's devastating him. He mentions that he is significantly happier now having gone back to blogging than he was at Disney. It's just a blog post, about a big era of his life, which is now over with. He's human. He can feel disappointed that 15 years of his work was taken offline, and reminisce about the ways things went wrong, both on his and his employer's end.
zombittack 5mo ago
At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.
- applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
  > I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. Virtue signalling is a funny term. What, exactly, does it mean here? In what way is reminiscing about a venture that lasted 15 years of your life "virtue signalling"? It seems to be that word is trotted out as a meaningless cliche, something in the sense of "I don't like this thing, but I'll sound more sophisticated if I accuse it of this nebulous bad thing rather than just saying I don't like it". The man is allowed to write a blog post about the final conclusion of a huge phase of his life. You don't have to give him your sympathy, but there's nothing wrong with writing about it.
  - cindyllm 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - shermantanktop 5mo ago
    “Virtue signaling” has become a thought-terminating cliche. All it really amounts to is an accusation of insincerity motivated by vanity, which is a two-for-one ad hominem attack that allows the accuser to avoid responding to the actual point.
    - burritoAlPast0r 5mo ago
      It is a statement on a culture that values insincere "feelgoodery" over truth. We can decry the downfall of common sense even if it comes at the expense of pointing out the obvious. Imo this is a good trend.
jmyeet 5mo ago
Polling, particularly in US elections, is hard. A lot of people, particularly tech people, got very excited about Nate Silver and 538 after the 2012 presidential elections but they shouldn't have. When you look at any polling or election predictions, the US has voluntary voting so it's not just a question of how people will vote but who will vote. So, if your predictions just guessed an outcome without explaining why (accurately) then it's just astrology, basically. In polling circles, the voters tend to be segmented into high and low propensity voters. High propensity voters will always vote. Low propensity voters won't. But the differences are often so small the results can flip on unexpected turnout in just one segment of the voters. As an example, the 2024 election turned on 3 big factors: 1. Millions of Biden voters in 2020 stayed home. Affordability was the biggest factor but there are were other huge factors too, most notably Palestine; 2. Trump retained the white vote while increasing his share of the Hispanic vote; and 3. Trump activated younger, low-propensity voters. You'll often osee this described as the "podcast sphere". We're talking the people who end up in alt-right pipeline on Youtube and in podcasts (eg Andrew Tate). Most recent presidential elections come down the results in about 7-8 states. The other 42-43 are known before you go in with some rare exceptions. The most recent exception was Obama in 2008 who won Iowa, for example. Other big sweeps were Reagan in 1984 and Nixon in 1972. So, with a modern election you can just flip a coin 7 times and you have a 1 in 128 chance of just being correct, 50 out of 50. This is why you need to show your work with any prediction modeling and polling. You need to show how you reached your prediction in terms of turnout as well as how major demographics will vote. Every election cycle complicates this with external factors and per-state issues. Covid loomed large over 2020 but it also made voting easier than ever, with easy access to early voting and mail-in voting. This changes the high and low propensity voter math significantly. Also, the Arizona legislature went on a mission to punish Native Americans for flipping Arizona blue in 2020 by disenfranchising Native Americans in subsequent elections in many, many ways. So what tends to happen is that results are close enough that it become s abit of a guess. No pollster wants to be an outlier AND wrong so there's a convergence to mean thing that happens where they all tend to make the same prediction because everybody being wrong is way better, optically, than you being wrong and everyone else being right. Add to all this, population sampling used to be done on landlines decades ago. Now we just don't have an equivalent and if your sampling algorithm is off, your results are off. Garbage in, garbage out. I guess my point is that Nate Silver got kinda lucky in 2012 and came back to Earth in 2016 so I've never been that impressed and honestly I jus tdon't care if 538 exists or not.
crazypyro 5mo ago
I mean... you've spent how many articles talking shit about Disney and then complain they won't sell you back your baby that you sold to them. Hard to get sympathy here.
- panda888888 5mo ago
  I agree, and am getting downvoted in other comments for this position. If you sell a small company to a giant one, there's a major risk that they will sunset your work. It's the risk Nate knowingly took on when he sold the company. No surprises here, no sympathy from me, and his blog post reads like he's a sore loser. (Disney sucks and isn't blameless, but this is very much a standard business practice.)
waterTanuki 5mo ago
Even if you believe Nate Silver's analysis was deeply flawed/inaccurate the layout and presentation of the data itself made it easy for others to understand why it was flawed or innacurate. Modern science is built on thousands and thousands of failed experiments and research that went the wrong path. That makes preservation of this site important, more important than whatever personal grudge you may hold against him.
pclmulqdq 5mo ago
I think Nate Silver is off the mark as to what Disney wanted to get out of this. Entertainment companies like Disney make plays where they buy a huge portfolio of entertainment assets and see which ones manage to hit it big. They invest resources and they help quite a lot, but it does come down to the entertainer to take it all the way. In other words, a Disney executive probably bought 538 expecting that it might become the next CNN or Fox - the next big secondary source news analysis platform. Note that Disney doesn't have one of those in their portfolio right now. Instead, 538 continued to produce wonkish articles about esoterica of sports and politics statistics, and did not expand to the grand role that Disney may have imagined. The ad revenue from some wonkish articles isn't going to cover the cost of a number of writers and statisticians, which is why Nate Silver went to a bigger player in the first place. The core problem here seems to be that the visions of the buyers were not aligned with Nate Silver's vision. He wanted to continue having a blog on esoteric statistics, but with the resources of a news network. They may have wanted to have a news network, and acquire it at the price of a blog on esoteric statistics. This wasn't a loss-leading "feather in the cap" for Disney, but a bet that simply didn't pay off and needed to be put out to pasture.
- pixl97 5mo ago
  Same effect as Killed By Google.
- shalmanese 5mo ago
  This is the wrong level of analysis. Disney owns ABC, ABC owned 538. The relevant decisions were made by ABC’s leadership. And the firing of the staff happened years ago and people broadly understood even if they did not agree with it. The recent decision was to take down an archive that cost $8 in server resources and was still bringing in page views and ad revenue.
  - Gud 5mo ago
    Nothing costs $8 in a corporate setting.
- rwmj 5mo ago
  This plus to be "Disney-level" successful means if it doesn't make 10s/100s of millions in profit, it's not worth doing. Something that's ordinarily successful (even making steady millions each year) is going to get the chop.
omot 5mo ago
what i miss most about 538: whether it’s elections or the play offs, nothing comes close to how clean and fun the data interaction felt. i would constantly refresh any time a game finished or when a started called a candidate. i wonder who the front end engineer was, and what they’re doing now. would love for them to be building more fun ways to be interacting with data.
kenferry 5mo ago
I enjoyed FiveThirtyEight back in the day, but does anyone actually go back and look at the old posts? They were very much of the moment. I'd imagine the vast vast majority of the traffic to them is robots. I can see why they wouldn't be a priority to keep up. For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive? Nate seems to try to justify this a touch, saying he personally was looking for a specific article. Kind of a special case there…
- Shank 5mo ago
  > For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive? I encourage anyone who thinks this is true to actually look for things in the internet archive and report back success. If you have the original exact URL you might be able to easily find something in the wayback machine, but if you have only a vague inclination that something existed and a general timeframe, it's a needle in a haystack. The wayback machine is, also extremely slow to retrieve data.
randyrand 5mo ago
If you cared so much about it, why did you sell it?

457 points by 7777777phil 5mo ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553

Call me a skeptic, but it's certainly odd all the errors always lean to one side. Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press. > What happened in 2024 isn’t something I’d have scripted, though. Basically, their new election model was literally broken, continuing to show Joe Biden virtually tied with Trump even after his disastrous debate. (Evidently because Morris’s design for it had been overcomplicated. These models are hard to design, by the way.)

tkzed49 5mo ago
Why would a left-leaning press engineer errors predicting the victory of the left? Wouldn't this lull supporters of the Democrats into a false sense of security and enable Republican wins?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- guywithahat 5mo ago
  I think it's more of a systemic issue than top-down manipulation. Like, as a hypothetical, they're disregarding some people as being extremist when in reality they have reasonable, representative views. This produces biased results, and people who agree with the results share them because it supports their world view. The shares and new revenue reinforce the companies decision to produce biased reports, and the effect is politicians read these popular reports thinking they're accurate and make policy decisions around them, when in reality they're just a political wish-list.
LanceH 5mo ago
It seems calling a state purple is just using a synonym for red.
Octoth0rpe 5mo ago
> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press. What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.
- CGMthrowaway 5mo ago
  >cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing
  - rc_kas 5mo ago
    Remember when Net Nuetrality was the priority of hackernews and slashdot and basically all people in tech. Now it's a "leftist policy". We live in crazy times. Overton window has definitely shifted to the right. Beign a normal person who values science is now considered "leftist". Its nuts.
    - Terr_ 5mo ago
      There's also a bloc that's been working to try to retroactively redefine what "Net Neutrality" means. Instead of the usual stuff like "consumers have rights" or "ISP monopolies are bad" or "utilities should just provide the product and not spy and manipulate", they want it to mean something closer to "no online community can moderate itself." And that's the charitable version. The worse version involves rank hypocrisy and selective enforcement, where large social "networks" must be "neutral" to literal nazis, while somehow it's also OK to permaban for insulting Dear Leader.
    - JuniperMesos 5mo ago
      The set of people who are "basically all people in tech" has changed a lot since then for a variety of reasons; it's not surprising that any given political issue from a decade ago might not have the same resonance today.
jdlshore 5mo ago
Are you sure you aren’t experiencing selection bias? The article only mentions one modeling error (the one you quoted), so “all the errors” must be the ones you’ve noticed elsewhere.
convolvatron 5mo ago
its this really what we're left with, people sharing their skepticism? without any dint of rationale, just stories about how these obviously bad people did all this stuff that everyone knows. I'm not going to defend Silver's predictions, but what was really refreshing about his work was some lovely diagrams, and real intent behind exposing his methodology. it was never 'trust me I'm the expert', but 'wow, this is hard and these are the problems and this is how I tried to deal with them'
jandrese 5mo ago
> leftward trend of the mainstream press Oh yeah, venerable institutions like the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the like? Or maybe you mean the TV news organizations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar, or Hearst? Or maybe cable news organizations like CNN or Fox News? The narrative of the "liberal media" is so out of date it makes you look out of touch. The mainstream media is captured by billionaire interests and has been so for years now.
burnte 5mo ago
> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press. What? Media in the USA has staggered to the right over the past ten years. The only reason it was called liberal before that was because one party used facts and data and the other preferred to rig the system against the common people. While Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" it's joke only in that the conservative viewpoint today seems focused on imaginary problems and denying the existence of real ones.
- joshstrange 5mo ago
  > Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" Video (queued up): https://youtu.be/IJ-a2KeyCAY?t=270 https://youtu.be/IJ-a2KeyCAY?t=270 It's always pretty depressing to go back and watch this or old Colbert Report episodes and realize how parts are incredibly "evergreen", sometimes you don't even need to change out the names.
rvba 5mo ago
Maybe there were no errors and a certain techbro helped with the counting machines so right wing could win?

ilamont 5mo ago

A Pew study of a random sample of Internet links conducted in October 2023 found significant “link rot”: almost 40 percent of links that had been active 10 years earlier were broken. And that’s probably an underestimate: the study was based on the Common Crawl web archive (the same one that AI labs use to train their models), which is quite comprehensive but probably contains some bias toward more prominent sites. "Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage. If we're talking about news sites, or commentary, or blogs, or magazines, or newspapers, or other publishers, the number of dead links will be far higher. Those are the types of sites that are likely to fail, be acquired, get migrated, or become paywalled. I worked as a technology journalist for years starting in the late 90s. I did a lot of freelance work as well, and almost nothing survives online. There were media brands that were shut down, content migrated to another site, the CMS was migrated from Drupal to Wordpress to something else, there were two or three acquisitions, and so on. Last week, I checked some articles that I worked on between 3 and 10 years ago and they were either 404s or paywalled. When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them. My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.

toomuchtodo 5mo ago
https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/introducing-vanishing-culture-a-new-book-on-the-loss-of-our-digital-memory/ https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/introducing-vanishing-cu... https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026 https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026 (when able, please consider donating to the Internet Archive; they are the durable, long term storage system of last resort) > Yes, you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin. The election models and polling averages are here, and new-and-improved versions of the sports models (PELE, ELWAY, COOPER) are gradually returning too.2 Galen Druke, Clare Malone and I have even been getting the old podcast crew back together for live shows. With regards to: > When I left one of the higher-profile pubs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, I knew my articles wouldn't last even though they were migrated to a sister publication. I made PDF copies of every single one. I still have them in a folder somewhere, not sure what to do with them. May I suggest: https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/ https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/ You can upload them all as a single item, or as individual items per piece and asking IA Patron Services to create a collection for you. > My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point. Drop links, and they will be queued for crawling, if not already archived. If you would like to self serve, https://web.archive.org/save https://web.archive.org/save

SilverElfin 5mo ago

It’s what happened to Star Wars. Figures.

superfrank 5mo ago
How so? To me it seems like the exact opposite of what's happened with Star Wars in the last 20 years. 538 was purchased and then left to wither and die where as Disney seems intent on squeezing every last penny from the Star Wars franchise by using the IP as much as possible
- SilverElfin 5mo ago
  Disney removed a lot of the earlier IP from the official Star Wars storyline shortly after acquiring it. That IP was much better than the complete mess and politicization of Star Wars that happened in the sequels. Sure they are trying to squeeze money out of it - and maybe some of the TV shows are tolerable - but they killed the brand and its best content in the process.
  - wredcoll 5mo ago
    Good point, Star Wars was famously not about politics. Very apolitical.
    - teddyh 5mo ago
      The politics of the original trilogy Star Wars was essentially “dictators and fascists with big armies are bad”. It was naïve and simplistic; a simple storytelling device, nothing more. There was no conscious choice behind it. If it had been made 40 years earlier, the enemies would have been savage indigenous people, as was the style at the time. The politics of modern Star Wars are… specific. Pointed. Winking at the camera. I suspect they may not age well.
      - hobofan 5mo ago
        The Viet Cong parallels in the original Star Wars about as much "winking at the camera" as current Star Wars is to current politics.

divbzero 5mo ago

Some of Disney’s most valuable properties—ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars—were acquired. FiveThirtyEight may be smaller, but it should be in Disney’s self-interest to set things right and earn a reputation for being a good home for acquisitions.

slg 5mo ago
> ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars And all of those have declined in reputation since their acquisition or soon after.
- famouswaffles 5mo ago
  That's not remotely true. Disney bought ESPN in 1996, Marvel in 2009 (literally had 2 movies released here and one of them flopped) and Pixar in 2006. For Pixar, they and Disney were joined at the hip even before acquisition. Besides distribution rights, Disney had full sequel rights to almost all of Pixar's catalogue at the time. Disney could have made a sequel to Finding Nemo, The Incredibles etc even without Pixar's blessing or involvement. There is quite literally no Pixar without Disney. Marvel? Their most successful years were under Disney. ESPN did not become the media empire you know it as until well after Disney's acquisition either.
  - slg 5mo ago
    I specifically said reputation. Disney has a history of buying properties and squeezing every last dollar out of them until nothing is left but a husk of what they were at their peak. Disney certainly got their money’s worth out of those purchases. I’m not denying that. But the reputation of all of them has been on a steep decline even if there were temporary spikes after the acquisition. I’ll grant you that “soon after” might have been a stretch for ESPN, but it’s obviously true for the others. Almost all of Pixar’s most enduring films had their start before Disney bought the company. The same is true with Marvel. Sure, Disney’s fanfare might have played before the Avengers films, but those movies were the brainchild of Kevin Fiege, who was already in charge before the Disney purchase. You can maybe claim Disney has a good eye for finding companies on an upward trajectory, but these are all examples of Disney management’s failure to be a long-term steward of their acquisitions.

chao- 5mo ago

>The Times was also in the midst of a leadership transition, and new management tends to want to move on from the old regime’s pet projects, even if they were successful. Learning about B2B sales over the years, the size of this leadership-change factor has been among the most eye-opening (and among the most disappointing). It cuts both ways: You can have a successful pilot that doesn't proceed because this-or-that VP was replaced, and to show off their bold new direction, the new VP cancels almost everything novel the previous person started. Or you can reach out just at the moment the new guy or gal comes in, right when they're looking for the pieces of their bold new direction, and you become part of that. I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy. Alas. At least I have been fortunate enough to experience both directions in quantities that roughly balance out.

nostrademons 5mo ago
> I would love to have later learned that leaders who evaluate opportunities separate from personal attachment are seen as more efficient, better, and selected favorably; that more successful companies are less subject to this sort of political/careerist whimsy. My experience is that it's the opposite: the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy. At more successful companies, it basically doesn't matter what the executives do, because the company's moat is so big that it can tolerate grotesque mismanagement and still make money. (This is the converse of the old aphorism "When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact."). Executives seem extremely uncomfortable with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars and yet nothing they do matters, and so they're intent on leaving their mark. Thus, they cancel all the pet projects of the past management, instill their own ideas, and boldly take the company in a new direction. Except not really, because the fundamental parts of the business that make it work are all handled by people 8 levels down in the org chart whose job functions are considered common sense by everybody and never really up for discussion. At least, this was my experience at Google, which is perhaps the best money-making machine ever invented and yet is grotesquely mismanaged by mid-level VPs that cancel every promising new product that comes out, only to start their own initiatives that themselves get canceled by their successors.

nashashmi 5mo ago

> Founder Nate Silver left in 2023, taking the rights to his forecasting model with him to his website Silver Bulletin.[7][8][9] The site's new owner, Disney, hired G. Elliott Morris to develop a new model.[7][8] On September 18, 2023, the original website domain at fivethirtyeight.com was closed, with web traffic becoming redirected to ABC News pages, and its logo was replaced, with the name 538 used instead of FiveThirtyEight.[2] On March 5, 2025, 538 was shut down by ABC News and its staff were laid off.[10] On May 15, 2026, ABC redirected thousands of archived 538 articles to the politics section of their news website, making them inaccessible. From Wikipedia.

cm2012 5mo ago

What a delightfully educational article on how the corporate world works

doctorpangloss 5mo ago
it was super interesting. My gut was like, jesus christ, if you don't live in New York City, seriously, absolutely nobody gives a single flying fuck about any of this stuff!

simonw 5mo ago

In situations like this I always wonder if there's a decision maker somewhere in the pipeline who just has values and a mental model of the world that's entirely foreign to me - for whom the idea of deleting a decade+ of content from the web doesn't strike them as bad in the slightest.

outside1234 5mo ago
I would actually say that for most business people this is all "about numbers" and aren't in the slightest worried about deleting something. This is why efforts like Internet Archive and others are so important. Whatever you think of 538, it _is_ history, and in this digital world it needs to be preserved.
panda888888 5mo ago
I can easily see the argument that once an election is over, people don't read the content anymore. Granted, storage is cheap so this is kinda silly, but I bet the old articles weren't getting very much traffic.

legitster 5mo ago

> The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it. There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company. At one point, other senior staffers and I basically begged Disney to turn on a paywall, figuring this could provide some security, and were told, essentially, that it just wasn’t worth Disney’s bandwidth to figure out the mechanics of one. I cannot tell you how much of my professional career I have seen this play out again and again and again. There is an "executive class" in this country that has never had a real job or done real work. They were born to privilege, they went to elite schools, got their first check from a major consultancy, and then spend their whole career bouncing from C-suite to C-suite. They stare at slides all day, occasionally make a meaningful decision, and more or less spend their time insulating themselves from failure. This may not describe everyone in charge at every major company, but it describes enough to explain why everything in our economy just feels like it's piggybacking off of a handful of actually good businesses.

forshaper 5mo ago
Insulation in our society has gone all the way up and down.
underlipton 5mo ago
It's not the full story, but it's certainly a large part of it. I'll chime in tangentially with another large part: the disproportionate share of both asset and liquid wealth held by people who are some combination of a) Baby Boomers, b) in the top percentiles of wealth/income, c) politically- or socially-connected. As you say, it's not all of them, but enough of them. At the confluence of the two groups is a desire not to invest in potentially risky ventures, or to spend on consumption, but instead to put as much money as possible into a narrow band of low-risk, often passive investments, and to pull every lever possible to protect those investments, even when they become outmoded in some regard and the income stream or economic activity that supports their high (growing) valuation dries up. Supporting this paradigm (ostensibly so that seniors don't die in poverty, so that strategically-important businesses and ventures are backstopped, etc., but, crucially, to the detriment of all other concerns) means an erosion of a sort of "constructive inefficiency": "wasted" spending on ventures that might not work out, on employees who are not the best and most productive, on niche services and products, which altogether represent a massive share of potential economic activity that is much better at involving and supporting a diverse population with diverse needs and diverse skill sets that perhaps have not yet found the correct outlet to produce maximal value. Your C-suite goons and my rich, highly networked seniors don't care about the potential of a paradigm shift to support and enable short-term losers, though. They just want to pile into the sure-thing of your "actually good businesses" (which, in many cases, aren't actually that good).

ninth_ant 5mo ago

> I did too much bragging in the media and didn’t anticipate the extent to which public opinion toward FiveThirtyEight would shift once we became a corporate-backed incumbent rather than an eccentric upstart Can’t speak for everyone else, but it wasn’t this for me. It was about 2016 presidential that lost me. He tries to justify this later about how theirs was better than other outlets but I don’t care. Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want, but regardless I had zero interest in reading any of their predictions or analyses after that. Not even mad, just that to my experience they had one job and they didn’t fulfill it at the most important time. They went from appearing insightful to just one opinion amongst so many others.

shawabawa3 5mo ago
Because they said trump only had a 30% chance to win? What if they had said 49%? Would that have made their prediction worthless?
- bellowsgulch 5mo ago
  I mean everyone said he had a snowball’s chance in hell and then we ended up with him for two terms because the Democrats can’t stop fighting over the worse possible candidates to back that no one is asking for.
  - palata 5mo ago
    I find it interesting to blame it on the democrats. We ended up with him because enough people voted for him.
    - kjkjadksj 5mo ago
      The blame is put on democrats because when they lose its because they don’t turn out and when they win its because they do. It is quite simple really. Republicans are far more reliable voters. You can look at vote totals and see this pattern. Massive delta for democrats election over election and usually half that delta for republicans.

carlcortright 5mo ago

This is quite sad.

grebc 5mo ago

No wonder Disney won’t bother giving him his domain back.

sbxfree 5mo ago

It feels a little disingenuous to call out your opponent's model failures when Silver's model on Live Election Night also completely bugged out showing Kamala as more favored as she lost state after state: https://web.archive.org/web/20241109030935/https://www.thedailybeast.com/nate-silver-gives-up-on-his-prediction-model-in-middle-of-election-night/ https://web.archive.org/web/20241109030935/https://www.theda...

jerlam 5mo ago

RIP 538's burrito bracket from 2014

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Traster 5mo ago

The more I read about how big businesses operate the more I think it resembles the weather. There's no intelligence in there, it's just random fluctuations. FiveThirtyEight never made any sense at Disney and seems to have been passed around there more like a trinket than a decades work of dozens of people.

Eric_WVGG 5mo ago
One of the most frustrating things about getting older — besides all the fun stuff that happens to your knees and hair — is the fact that younger generations just take what has been normal their whole lives and say “yes this is the normal state of affairs.” We used to have laws and limits regarding media ownership. One company couldn’t own every radio station in most of America. Distributors couldn’t own studios. Etc. Disney should never have been allowed to buy 538 in the first place. ABC, possibly…? But Disney shouldn't be allowed to own ABC!! (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!) The state we’re in is not normal and it wasn’t necessary and we don’t have to just live with it if we don’t want to.
- satiric 5mo ago
  Interesting in learning more - what bill is this that was passed by Clinton?
  - ascagnel_ 5mo ago
    The Telecommunications Act of 1996. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996 It passed with support from both parties in both the House and Senate.
- ascagnel_ 5mo ago
  > (And if you’re left-leaning, you can’t pin this mess on the “corporation-friendly” Republican Party because it was Bill Clinton who put his signature on this mess!) I would argue Clinton's presidency moved the Democrats from a center-left party to a center-right party, given its platform of welfare reform and free trade at the expense of labor rights and the social safety net.

panda888888 5mo ago

Am I the only one who finds this whole blog post to be super unprofessional? I agree it's sad that the content is gone, but airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth (assuming you're not a whistleblower talking about illegal activity or something like that). I feel bad for Nate Silver, but business is business. I guess he had to learn that lesson the hard way.

applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
> airing grievances about your former employer leaves a bad taste in my mouth Absolutely not. Creating a culture where employees are expected to be silent about their (mis)treatment by wealthy owners is only favorable, to, well, wealthy owners. Business is business, so why is it unprofessional to point out they're bad at business?
- panda888888 5mo ago
  I view Nate as basically acting like a sore loser here, which is why I find it unprofessional. I'm not arguing that we should clamp down on free speech or anything like that. If a company wants to buy another company and sunset it, that's a normal business practice. I get that it's disappointing, but in no way is this "mistreatment." At least to me, this is a perfectly normal business situation that doesn't merit this level of complaining. It reads as an ex-employee being petty.
  - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
    Funny, this story reads as ABC/Disney being petty to me. They were made a business offer to repurchase an IP that is worth nothing to them, and are instead choosing to blackhole any value it has and burn it to the ground because somebody with an ego has a personal grievance over Disney having been criticised for their management of the brand in the past. If that's what professional conduct entails in your eyes, I don't suppose there will be any agreement in our views.
    - 5mo ago

pupppet 5mo ago

Easy to go after Disney for this, but did Nate have to sell to ESPN to begin with? I've been burned too many times subscribing to services that go to shit because the owner wanted their payday. Let's stop (only) blaming the buyer.

applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
He literally said he made the wrong choice by choosing ESPN, so he's in agreement with you.
- pupppet 5mo ago
  The focus of the stories making the rounds about this are not about Nate having made some mistake, they're about big bad Disney deleting someone's work (which yes is also true).
- panda888888 5mo ago
  Yes, but he's failing to see the big picture. Selling any small company to any big company leads to this risk. To hold water, his argument should be: "we shouldn't have sold the business at all," not "we shouldn't have sold to ESPN." I personally don't love ESPN/Disney/ABC, but basically all major corporations that make acquisitions do this. Google does it all the time. It's very clearly a known risk when you sell a startup. I don't have much sympathy.
  - applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
    It wouldn't have been a business to begin with if he didn't sell it. At the time, it was just a blog driving a modest amount of ad revenue. Partnering with bigger outfits allowed him to hire staff and cover more ground, something that he could never do without outside investment. He has since returned to blogging, which to my understanding drives enough revenue for himself and exactly one assistant. I replied to your comment, and now you've replied to two other threads I've commented in reiterating that Nate is a sore loser who deserves what he got and he should have expected this. To be honest, it sounds like you have some kind of personal grievance with him. His post doesn't come off like he wasn't expecting this outcome, or that it's devastating him. He mentions that he is significantly happier now having gone back to blogging than he was at Disney. It's just a blog post, about a big era of his life, which is now over with. He's human. He can feel disappointed that 15 years of his work was taken offline, and reminisce about the ways things went wrong, both on his and his employer's end.

zombittack 5mo ago

At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.

applfanboysbgon 5mo ago
> I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. Virtue signalling is a funny term. What, exactly, does it mean here? In what way is reminiscing about a venture that lasted 15 years of your life "virtue signalling"? It seems to be that word is trotted out as a meaningless cliche, something in the sense of "I don't like this thing, but I'll sound more sophisticated if I accuse it of this nebulous bad thing rather than just saying I don't like it". The man is allowed to write a blog post about the final conclusion of a huge phase of his life. You don't have to give him your sympathy, but there's nothing wrong with writing about it.
- cindyllm 5mo ago
  [dead]
- shermantanktop 5mo ago
  “Virtue signaling” has become a thought-terminating cliche. All it really amounts to is an accusation of insincerity motivated by vanity, which is a two-for-one ad hominem attack that allows the accuser to avoid responding to the actual point.
  - burritoAlPast0r 5mo ago
    It is a statement on a culture that values insincere "feelgoodery" over truth. We can decry the downfall of common sense even if it comes at the expense of pointing out the obvious. Imo this is a good trend.

jmyeet 5mo ago

Polling, particularly in US elections, is hard. A lot of people, particularly tech people, got very excited about Nate Silver and 538 after the 2012 presidential elections but they shouldn't have. When you look at any polling or election predictions, the US has voluntary voting so it's not just a question of how people will vote but who will vote. So, if your predictions just guessed an outcome without explaining why (accurately) then it's just astrology, basically. In polling circles, the voters tend to be segmented into high and low propensity voters. High propensity voters will always vote. Low propensity voters won't. But the differences are often so small the results can flip on unexpected turnout in just one segment of the voters. As an example, the 2024 election turned on 3 big factors: 1. Millions of Biden voters in 2020 stayed home. Affordability was the biggest factor but there are were other huge factors too, most notably Palestine; 2. Trump retained the white vote while increasing his share of the Hispanic vote; and 3. Trump activated younger, low-propensity voters. You'll often osee this described as the "podcast sphere". We're talking the people who end up in alt-right pipeline on Youtube and in podcasts (eg Andrew Tate). Most recent presidential elections come down the results in about 7-8 states. The other 42-43 are known before you go in with some rare exceptions. The most recent exception was Obama in 2008 who won Iowa, for example. Other big sweeps were Reagan in 1984 and Nixon in 1972. So, with a modern election you can just flip a coin 7 times and you have a 1 in 128 chance of just being correct, 50 out of 50. This is why you need to show your work with any prediction modeling and polling. You need to show how you reached your prediction in terms of turnout as well as how major demographics will vote. Every election cycle complicates this with external factors and per-state issues. Covid loomed large over 2020 but it also made voting easier than ever, with easy access to early voting and mail-in voting. This changes the high and low propensity voter math significantly. Also, the Arizona legislature went on a mission to punish Native Americans for flipping Arizona blue in 2020 by disenfranchising Native Americans in subsequent elections in many, many ways. So what tends to happen is that results are close enough that it become s abit of a guess. No pollster wants to be an outlier AND wrong so there's a convergence to mean thing that happens where they all tend to make the same prediction because everybody being wrong is way better, optically, than you being wrong and everyone else being right. Add to all this, population sampling used to be done on landlines decades ago. Now we just don't have an equivalent and if your sampling algorithm is off, your results are off. Garbage in, garbage out. I guess my point is that Nate Silver got kinda lucky in 2012 and came back to Earth in 2016 so I've never been that impressed and honestly I jus tdon't care if 538 exists or not.

crazypyro 5mo ago

I mean... you've spent how many articles talking shit about Disney and then complain they won't sell you back your baby that you sold to them. Hard to get sympathy here.

panda888888 5mo ago
I agree, and am getting downvoted in other comments for this position. If you sell a small company to a giant one, there's a major risk that they will sunset your work. It's the risk Nate knowingly took on when he sold the company. No surprises here, no sympathy from me, and his blog post reads like he's a sore loser. (Disney sucks and isn't blameless, but this is very much a standard business practice.)

waterTanuki 5mo ago

Even if you believe Nate Silver's analysis was deeply flawed/inaccurate the layout and presentation of the data itself made it easy for others to understand why it was flawed or innacurate. Modern science is built on thousands and thousands of failed experiments and research that went the wrong path. That makes preservation of this site important, more important than whatever personal grudge you may hold against him.

pclmulqdq 5mo ago

I think Nate Silver is off the mark as to what Disney wanted to get out of this. Entertainment companies like Disney make plays where they buy a huge portfolio of entertainment assets and see which ones manage to hit it big. They invest resources and they help quite a lot, but it does come down to the entertainer to take it all the way. In other words, a Disney executive probably bought 538 expecting that it might become the next CNN or Fox - the next big secondary source news analysis platform. Note that Disney doesn't have one of those in their portfolio right now. Instead, 538 continued to produce wonkish articles about esoterica of sports and politics statistics, and did not expand to the grand role that Disney may have imagined. The ad revenue from some wonkish articles isn't going to cover the cost of a number of writers and statisticians, which is why Nate Silver went to a bigger player in the first place. The core problem here seems to be that the visions of the buyers were not aligned with Nate Silver's vision. He wanted to continue having a blog on esoteric statistics, but with the resources of a news network. They may have wanted to have a news network, and acquire it at the price of a blog on esoteric statistics. This wasn't a loss-leading "feather in the cap" for Disney, but a bet that simply didn't pay off and needed to be put out to pasture.

pixl97 5mo ago
Same effect as Killed By Google.
shalmanese 5mo ago
This is the wrong level of analysis. Disney owns ABC, ABC owned 538. The relevant decisions were made by ABC’s leadership. And the firing of the staff happened years ago and people broadly understood even if they did not agree with it. The recent decision was to take down an archive that cost $8 in server resources and was still bringing in page views and ad revenue.
- Gud 5mo ago
  Nothing costs $8 in a corporate setting.
rwmj 5mo ago
This plus to be "Disney-level" successful means if it doesn't make 10s/100s of millions in profit, it's not worth doing. Something that's ordinarily successful (even making steady millions each year) is going to get the chop.

omot 5mo ago

what i miss most about 538: whether it’s elections or the play offs, nothing comes close to how clean and fun the data interaction felt. i would constantly refresh any time a game finished or when a started called a candidate. i wonder who the front end engineer was, and what they’re doing now. would love for them to be building more fun ways to be interacting with data.

kenferry 5mo ago

I enjoyed FiveThirtyEight back in the day, but does anyone actually go back and look at the old posts? They were very much of the moment. I'd imagine the vast vast majority of the traffic to them is robots. I can see why they wouldn't be a priority to keep up. For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive? Nate seems to try to justify this a touch, saying he personally was looking for a specific article. Kind of a special case there…

Shank 5mo ago
> For archival purposes, I'd think everything is still in the internet archive? I encourage anyone who thinks this is true to actually look for things in the internet archive and report back success. If you have the original exact URL you might be able to easily find something in the wayback machine, but if you have only a vague inclination that something existed and a general timeframe, it's a needle in a haystack. The wayback machine is, also extremely slow to retrieve data.

randyrand 5mo ago

If you cared so much about it, why did you sell it?