ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

https://twitter.com/baseballot/status/2055309076209492208

by cmsparks • 2 months ago

390 154 2 months ago

But why?

cmsparks• 2 months ago

No 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

fn-mote2• 2 months 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.

tstrimple2• 2 months ago

It 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• 2 months ago

Nate Silver has some pretty good commentary on it all on his X account (https://x.com/NateSilver538).

hightrix• 2 months ago

A link for those of us without twitter accounts.

https://xcancel.com/NateSilver538

BeetleB2• 2 months ago

I'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• 2 months ago

The 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• 2 months ago

ABC has opted to step on Thucydides Trap.

woodydesign• 2 months ago

Oh NO, that's probably the best infographic news sites I was keep visiting and learn

BeetleB2• 2 months ago

538 was sunset over a year ago.

TurdF3rguson2• 2 months ago

I feel like it was at least 10 years ago

jmclnx• 2 months ago

The 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.

lotsofpulp4• 2 months ago

I 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• 2 months ago

No. 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• 2 months ago

If you sell out don't expect to control future events.

Lerc• 2 months ago

Fair enough, but you can still observe and make comments about them.

sharts2• 2 months ago

Fax. It’s amazing how many “leaders” fail to see that in exchange for the payout.

sambellll• 2 months ago

It's just odd to see a company buy a product and then promptly nuke it.

jimbob45• 2 months ago

538 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.

alisonatwork4• 2 months ago

Fifty Plus One kinda does that now: https://fiftyplusone.news/methodology

applfanboysbgon2• 2 months 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.

rurp4• 2 months ago

Wow. I have a low opinion of ABC as I said in another post, but this level of pettiness is still surprising to me.

brookst3• 2 months ago

It’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.

eugenekolo• 2 months ago

WOuldn't proof of that be some grounds for breach of fiduciary duty?

nradov• 2 months ago

Nope. There is really no case law to support such a legal theory.

jvanderbot• 2 months ago

Dunno - is protecting yourself from high-profile criticism by doing whatever you want with assets you 100% own and are under no contractual obligation to share ... also in fiduciary duty?

minimaxir• 2 months ago

It is not illegal to be petty during business negotiations.

tptacek• 2 months ago

No. People have weird beliefs about what fiduciary duty means. It does not mean that companies are required at all intervals to maximize revenue or profit.

8note• 2 months ago

the easy argument otherwise would be that if they sold the IP, they wouldnt be able to revive it in the future, and also they would have nate silver as a competitor in the space

umanwizard• 2 months ago

Why? Even if the common myth that public company executives must maximize profits at all costs were true, it's easy to construct a plausible explanation for why one might believe in good faith that destroying 538 rather than selling it is the best strategy to maximize profits. For example, because they think the profit they'd lose from 538 competing with their own politics offerings outweighs the amount Silver would pay for it.

TurdF3rguson2• 2 months ago

Just register fivethirtynine.com and don't look back.

queuebert2• 2 months ago

So Nate & Co sell out to a big corporation then are upset that it does big corporation stuff? I'm more mad at Nate here because 538 was my go-to for political coverage pre-sellout, and because of his greed it went away.

returningfory2• 2 months ago

Your annoyance is understandable, but it's worth remembering: he is not your slave. He does not exist to do things for you. His providing you with something good for a time does not obligate him to provide it to you forever. Because he is not your slave.

adjejmxbdjdn• 2 months ago

Whatever you feel about his actions that was at worst it was a win-lose decision. He benefited from it.

If his comment is accurate, then ABC’s decision is a clear lose-lose decision driven entirely by personal spite.

alisonatwork4• 2 months ago

538 had some decent years through its various sellout phases and imo hit its peak after Nate Silver left - he'd long since exposed himself more as a contrarian than a serious analyst and had become a real detriment to the brand.

It was definitely sad to lose 538 how we did, but G Elliott Morris has really stepped up to continue the spirit on his Strength in Numbers blog. It's the best data-driven US politics reporting out there right now imo. He also contributes to Fifty Plus One with Mary Radcliffe, and that's excellent too, reminiscent of the old 538 polling roundup stuff that went beyond just core US politics. Recently he started a podcast with David Nir of The Downballot, which is another solid resource for lower level races.

Hnrobert42• 2 months ago

I understand your frustration, but greed? He didn't owe you anything. So what if he cashed out?

bfung• 2 months ago

Just follow the man, not the brand. He’s still doing his thing: https://www.natesilver.net/

marysol5• 2 months ago

"Upset" is far from what happened here.

vintermann2• 2 months ago

It's petty even for a corporation. It's not exactly maximizing shareholder value. But yeah, it's the sort of stuff corporations (especially media corporations) can be expected to do.

I think Nate has become better at this sort of stuff in recent years. But still, he said that Disney "hardly ever" interfered in their editorial process, oblivious to the implication.

(What it means is that Disney/ABC were perfectly willing to interfere in their editorial process, but rarely needed to since Nate said what they wanted him to say anyway).

fn-mote2• 2 months ago

then are upset that it does big corporation stuff

Parent says because they “criticized our management of the brand”.

Big corporations don’t give a crap. They are 100% about the bottom line.

This isn’t “big corporation” behavior.

donkyrf• 2 months ago

"I won't sell at any price" reads as an invitation to make a much higher bid.

It seems silly at best to take that as a literal statement.

rurp4• 2 months ago

It'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• 2 months ago

this 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.

forlorn_mammoth• 2 months ago

at least they aren't inefficient, like governments are. Because as you can clearly see market forces always lead to optimal resource allocations.

herpdyderp• 2 months ago

On the other hand, it's nice for the people receiving those paychecks (at least while they're still receiving them).

ajsnigrutin• 2 months ago

On the other hand, many startups don't do anything usable enough that people would pay money for, and their only 'exit strategy' is to be bought by one of those large companies and then dissolved after a year or two.

aworks• 2 months ago

Companies have a long history of mis-management of their acquisitions (and mis-managing their portfolio of projects outside their money-making expertise).

As you suggest, it's good that the alumni seem to be doing fine, although Harry Enten's commentary on CNN is not as thougtful as he was on 538 podcasts.

jimbokun3• 2 months ago

The 538 brand focusing on the quantitative aspects of politics and sports should have been massive in this age of omnipresent prediction markets and betting apps.

jaybrendansmith• 2 months ago

It's crazy. CBS has likely killed 'CBS News', '60 Minutes', and 'The Late Show', three brands worth likely billions if handled correctly. It's like they are scared of retaliation or something, allowing these brands to be destroyed for zero value in exchange. I've never seen anything like it in a free and open market.

ryukoposting• 2 months ago

Five thirty eight's relevance in the public eye peaked about 10 years ago. They missed on the Trump 1 election so badly it's like they weren't even aiming at the target. I think that damaged their credibility in a lot of folks' minds (mine, for example). That's the problem with hitching your reputation to your predictive ability. One big miss and you're discredited, forever.

IAmBroom3• 2 months ago

EVERYONE missed on the Trump-1 election. Even Trump (IMO) didn't expect to win; he was copying another bad candidate's example of cashing out on a book deal.

spprashant• 2 months ago

538 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• 2 months ago

In 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.

jimbokun3• 2 months ago

If they stayed viable into the heyday of prediction markets and betting apps they should have been printing money.

sanitycheck• 2 months ago

In 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• 2 months ago

Tangential: 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.

rurp4• 2 months ago

I 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• 2 months ago

I unsubscribed, got tired of them endlessly droning on about who the mayor of NYC should be. Not relevant to most of the world.

htrp• 2 months ago

If 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.

rurp4• 2 months ago

That'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• 2 months 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.

toyg• 2 months ago

I 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• 2 months ago

https://www.natesilver.net/

i was a casual reader of 538 back in the day. his substack feels pretty similar, if smaller in scope.

hungryhobbit3• 2 months ago

There's no cool map of how America is likely to vote in the next electioon the new site :(

chasd00• 2 months ago

Was 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• 2 months ago

I 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/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• 2 months ago

IIRC 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.

applfanboysbgon2• 2 months 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?

Jordan-117• 2 months ago

Whenever people knock them for mis-calling a race, the thing I always refer to (or would, if ABC hadn't burned the site down) is their "Check Our Work" page, which sorts all of their predictions across politics, sports, etc., bucketed by the odds they gave, and then showed the percentage of all outcomes that were accurately predicted. It was remarkably accurate -- i.e., races where a candidate was given 65% odds were indeed won by that candidate approximately 65% of the time. This was true from the surefire 95% odds (which did fail about 5% of the time) down to the 5% longshots (which pulled an upset about 5% of the time).

Here's the last archived version of the page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250306183754/https://projects....

kirrent• 2 months ago

Not to mention, when you use a Monte Carlo model, you can easily count the samples which lead to certain outcomes. In their review, they noted that the correlated polling miss in the Midwest was one of the most common scenarios making up that 35% chance of a Trump win.

The idea that Silver somehow 'hit' in 2012 when he correctly predicted all states and 'missed' in 2016 is so juvenile I get second hand embarrassment whenever I see it.

mercutio2• 2 months ago

Normies very bad at the concept of statistical calibration. News at 11!

But yes, I agree with you that it's surprising to hear people on Hacker News having the 180 degrees wrong impression that the general population appears to have taken away from the one thing normal people care about polling for: during presidential elections.

caconym_• 2 months ago

+1. It's insane how history has been rewritten here, though it probably helps that 95% of people don't understand what the fuck a forecast is. They translate "30% chance Trump wins" into "0% chance Trump wins" because 30 < 50. Try asking them whether they think a 45% chance of rain means it definitively isn't going to rain and hear the wind whistling through the empty space between their ears.

yesb• 2 months ago

I remember vaguely the opposite. They were the only major prediction site that thought Trump had any significant chance of winning.

tstrimple2• 2 months ago

Some ignorant people need to play X-Com. A 95% chance to hit a target does not mean you hit the target 100% of the time. For fucks sake, even D&D players understand the concept of a critical miss.

culi• 2 months ago

Really 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

The_Blade• 2 months ago

they took down the burrito bracket, it must be resurrected

when i lived in SF i found al pastor at Tacqueria Cancun messianic

toomanyrichies• 2 months ago

Their 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• 2 months ago

Looks like just 30 repos: https://github.com/orgs/fivethirtyeight/repositories?type=so...

liveoneggs• 2 months ago

Major news sites can just lean into mathwashing their political opinions pages and call it any random number they like.

sharts2• 2 months ago

How did they do that? How do you lose access to your own website?

cobertos• 2 months ago

They sold it a while ago

hedora• 2 months ago

This 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• 2 months ago

Wayback Machine / Internet Archive does have (some?) content:

<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>), which not only exists but is prominently placed (top bar, 3rd link of 8 content-based links) on the site.

DonHopkins• 2 months ago

What were the odds of ABC News taking all FiveThirtyEight articles offline?

I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot poll.

NordStreamYacht• 2 months ago

Not 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• 2 months ago

That's not what this was.

madrox• 2 months ago

ABC 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• 2 months ago

At first glance that’s absurd, but if AI really does kills social media with dead internet theory then they will have been right!

beart• 2 months ago

I 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• 2 months ago

Where 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• 2 months ago

I started doing actual politics rather than simply consuming it. It's more fun trust me.

alisonatwork4• 2 months ago

I 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• 2 months ago

What'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.

rldjbpin• 2 months ago

finally 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?

ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

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