Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

https://www.natesilver.net/p/disney-erased-fivethirtyeight

by 7777777phil • 2 months ago

457 260 2 months ago

dionian• 2 months 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• 2 months 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?

guywithahat• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

It seems calling a state purple is just using a synonym for red.

Octoth0rpe3• 2 months 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• 2 months 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

armchairhacker4• 2 months ago

According to AllSides, many outlets moved left, although some did move right: https://www.allsides.com/blog/AllSides-Media-Bias-Rating-Ove...

It and https://mediabiasfactcheck.com say NYTimes “leans left” and is “left-center” respectively.

What’s an example that you believe highlights NYTimes moving rightward?

jdlshore• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias"

Video (queued up): 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• 2 months ago

Maybe there were no errors and a certain techbro helped with the counting machines so right wing could win?

ilamont2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/introducing-vanishing-cu...

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/

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

ilamont2• 2 months ago

Thank you!

duskwuff• 2 months ago

"Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage.

It's also likely to include a lot of non-content links, e.g. links to index and navigation pages, interstitials, search results, user profiles, image galleries, etc. These sorts of links don't reliably address specific content, and it's natural that they'll change or die over time. This doesn't necessarily mean that anything valuable has been lost.

SilverElfin3• 2 months ago

It’s what happened to Star Wars. Figures.

superfrank• 2 months 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

SilverElfin3• 2 months 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.

divbzero• 2 months 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.

slg4• 2 months ago

ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars

And all of those have declined in reputation since their acquisition or soon after.

famouswaffles2• 2 months 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.

chasil2• 2 months ago

Berkshire Hathaway has this attitude, with the proviso that the corporate management at the acquired firm must be competent, and the firm be profitable and protected by a "moat."

It's amazing that they trot out Sees Candy every year for the shareholders' meeting when they own GEICO.

It seems that Disney isn't doing this quite right.

fuzzfactor• 2 months ago

For one thing See's Candy is fundamentally a value-added operation and GEICO is a positive cash flow financial structure which remains competitive by trying not to remove as much value from the customer as the next guy.

browningstreet• 2 months ago

They're running with their heads down, for at least as long as the current administration exists.

ConceptJunkie• 2 months ago

earn a reputation for being a good home for acquisitions.

It's way too late for that to be possible any more.

Eric_WVGG2• 2 months ago

Yeah, Disney, the company that recently tried to bankrupt several novelists by claiming that when they bought Star Wars, they didn't put themselves on the hook for respecting contracts that Lucas signed. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/sta...

Disney has never given a single f*ck about that reputation, but the chiefs who agree to these acquisitions never had to care about that.

chao-• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

robotresearcher2• 2 months ago

the more successful the company is, the more prone it is to flights of executive whimsy

Apple's Liquid Glass comes to mind.

The design exec responsible suddenly left Apple for Meta, a company rather less esteemed for design, and Apple still hasn't acknowledged this failure or backtracked.

RajT88• 2 months ago

I saw this up close once.

My job involves service contracts for the cloud. We get to know workloads and optimize them and learn how to troubleshoot them to reduce mitigation time.

I had a big customer go from "must have, non-negotiable" for my team to a non-renewal in weeks when a new CTO came in. Within a month, they had an outage we could have mitigated quickly and had our yearly contract pay for itself.

etruong42• 2 months ago

This is also my experience at Google, and I have not really figured out the incentives. Plenty of people seem _perfectly comfortable_ with the idea that they are being paid tens of millions of dollars when nothing that they do matters. And it takes enormous effort to get anything actually done in the face of our enormous bureaucracies. I have a few hypotheses:

  - Career progression is still a motivation. If there are enough sufficiently motivated people in the organization (whether they come from upper management, middle management, or frontline workers), leaders need to harness that motivation and move it in a direction and potentially dole out career rewards. Otherwise, that motivation that is not properly harnessed can be destructive.
  - Similar to the previous hypothesis, they might axed _because_ nothing they do matters. So they may thrash about, making enough noise and movement to convince enough people that they might actually be doing something important, and it would be risky to dismiss them from their position.
  - Turf wars/politics/etc. If you do "nothing", then you look replaceable. If you're just a very expensive paper-weight, someone may try to usurp your highly-paid paperweight position. Thus, the nash equilibrium is to do something that makes your position less likely to be usurped by making it look difficult or that you are uniquely qualified to do it.

daedrdev• 2 months ago

Once you look, you see this all the time when new CEOs join large companies, they feel the need to mark their territory by taking a dump on it.

jcheng• 2 months ago

"Sometimes you have to change things that are perfectly good just to make them your own." --Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock

Aurornis• 2 months ago

Having been on both sides of this: Often, one of the purposes of the leadership change was to start shedding the old regime's pet projects. Even semi-successful pet projects can be a distraction from the direction the company wants to go.

I've been unlucky enough to work under several executives who thought they could resist direction from the CEO and board. They pushed their pet projects and thought leadership would eventually see the light. Instead they got ejected from the company and replaced with someone who knew how to follow orders.

My cynical assumption when I first saw this was that it was all just politics, but I have to admit that life is so much easier when your management chain isn't fighting uphill all the time. If the CEO and board want the company working on some things and not others, you're on thin ice if your manager is assigning you to go against the company's direction. It's scarier when you may not even know what they're doing to you.

For this specific case, completely pulling the content offline feels like a loss across the board. I could see it happening as an overreaction, to send a message that the new management is serious about not repeating the (perceived or otherwise) mistakes of their predecessors with an unmistakable signal

3RTB297• 2 months ago

I imagine people won't like the comparison, but this is exactly how changes in leadership work for developing countries.

Anyone tied to the old regime that isn't immediately, obviously, and hugely beneficial to the top of the new ranks is scrapped. Business arrangements and government contracts have to be re-negotiated to cut in new leadership. If business owners don't hedge on both sides, and get in there immediately after the election, they become castigated as loyal to the old regime, leading to more friction, costs, and work to simply get back to normal operations.

nashashmi• 2 months 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.

cm20122• 2 months ago

What a delightfully educational article on how the corporate world works

doctorpangloss2• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

panda88888812• 2 months 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.

legitster2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Insulation in our society has gone all the way up and down.

underlipton• 2 months 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).

TitaRusell• 2 months ago

It's remarkably ironic that we are slowly returning to aristocracy.

Only it's worse this time. Say what you want about those French poofs and British lords: they were expected to do their duty on the battlefield.

WorldMaker• 2 months ago

To be fair, this is the second time the US has done a "trial run" on this sort of oligarchy. The Robber Barons of the First Gilded Age left their names on a lot of buildings in the country and left a lot of scars in several major industries.

ninth_ant2• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

bachmeier2• 2 months ago

When pressed before the election, Silver did not explain where Trump's much higher probability of winning came from. He predicted a Trump loss, Trump won, and he claimed victory because he gave Trump a better chance of winning. There's no way that strategy could have failed.

fabian2k2• 2 months ago

FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance. Their reporting did make clear that with margin was within the range of a normal polling error. And sometimes you get more than a normal polling error.

It doesn't help that the US has a terrible election system that often leads to small margins in some states being decisive.

kypro• 2 months ago

FiveThirtyEight gave Trump a 30% chance.

I know I'm being super conspiratorial here but why wouldn't all forecasters predict just between 30% - 70%? That way if they're "right" they can take the credit for it and if they're wrong they can say "well, we weren't that wrong". That's probably what I'd do anyway...

rurp4• 2 months ago

I had complaints about 538, especially the early days, but don't understand this critique at all. A 30% chance hitting is completely unremarkable, and it was a perfectly reasonable reading of the evidence at the time. Nate isn't wrong that conventional wisdom was way off, with even supposedly statistical models giving Hillary a 99% chance of winning.

Elections, like many things, have some inherent uncertainty. A several point polling error is normal, so a candidate who is down a couple points on election day has a decent shot of winning.

Retric• 2 months ago

Not just that, predictions also impact voter participation.

munchler2• 2 months ago

I think this is all true, but it dodges the bigger issue. A presidential election has a binary outcome: yes/no, win/lose. If your statistical model doesn’t contain this single bit in its output, then it doesn’t meet the minimum requirement for being a prediction.

Now you might say that it was on me as a consumer to understand this in 2016, but I remember the look of total shock on Nate Silver’s face when he called the winner on live TV that night, so clearly he didn’t really understand it either. Lesson learned for all of us, I guess.

lacewing2• 2 months ago

I don't understand why this is surprising. People didn't go to FiveThirtyEight to marvel the science behind it. The science was just supposed to give you what you came there for: the actual election results.

In the end, it turned out that predicting elections is still very hard, and that for all the fanfare, FiveThirtyEight performed only slightly better than what you could find in any other reputable newspaper, so it kinda lost its appeal.

ngriffiths2• 2 months ago

Discussion of stats models is always complicated by the fact that a lot of people will read "30%" as a "no" prediction and claim your model is wrong if the thing happens. On the one hand, one strategy is to "hide" the numbers a bit behind a blaring headline that says "we are not sure!!" It's a bit of an art to decide when to be "sure" or not. On the other hand, in research for example you can just say screw it, I care if the correct people are correct, not if a bunch of wrong people are wrong.

I feel like the correct strategy for 538 when it was actually niche was to be precise, but then it went viral and maybe should've hit the IDK button much harder and more often after that.

Sparkle-san• 2 months ago

I can't find the source anymore since 538 is no more, and I recall Nate even describing what could (and did) happen, which was that one swing state moving to the right had a high likelihood of them all moving to the right.

FergusArgyll2• 2 months ago

It was 30% in the end, before the nomination it famously gave him a 2% chance of getting nominated. All the talk about 30% is disingenuous

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FiveThirtyEight#2016_U.S._elec...

legitster2• 2 months ago

If I say you have a 50% chance to win a coin flip and you lose it, that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

A key thing though is 538 did regularly test the calibration their models: https://web.archive.org/web/20190410030104/https://fivethirt...

"What you’ll find, though, is that our calibration has generally been very, very good. For instance, out of the 5,589 events (between sports and politics combined) that we said had a 70 chance of happening (rounded to the nearest 5 percent), they in fact occurred 71 percent of the time. Or of the 55,853 events that we said had about a 5 percent chance of occurring, they happened 4 percent of the time."

tekla• 2 months ago

Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want

Yep definitely all those.

Why is it so hard to admit 30% is not 0%?

jackmott42• 2 months ago

Nate was a huge outlier in that prediction, he gave trump a better chance than almost anyone else that I can recall, so why are you mad at him about that?

What made me mad is Nate seemed to turn into a MAGA troll himself after that election.

jp57• 2 months ago

I really think a majority of NYTimes and ABCnews consumers don't know the difference between a 2/3 chance (super close) of winning and 2/3 of the vote (a landslide).

Traster2• 2 months ago

Apparently neither do a big chunk of HN readers.

tombert• 2 months ago

A dice roll has a 16.6% chance of landing on any given side, meaning an 83% chance of not landing on that side.

If you guessed a "two", and it landed on "two, I wouldn't really be that impressed, even though there was an 83% probability going against you.

bryanlarsen3• 2 months ago

538 used the example of Trump having approximately the same chance of winning the 2016 presidential election as the Cavaliers had of winning the NBA championship round vs the Warriors. Both Trump and the Cavaliers won with a ~25% predicted chance.

538 made very clear with this analogy that both Trump and the Cavs were underdogs, and that both had a solid chance of winning.

afavour2• 2 months ago

I think this gets to the core of why a lot of this election prediction stuff doesn't work. People just don't parse the numbers the way the authors intend.

FiveThirtyEight had Trump at a 30% chance of winning, and he won. The model wasn't wrong. The less likely of two outcomes occurred. Even if they'd had him at 1% they still wouldn't technically have been wrong though I think complaints might be more warranted.

If they had Trump at 49% would you have still been angry? What about at 51%? Would it have been okay then?

coliveira3• 2 months ago

Technically this is right. But if that is the case (and it seems to be), then a coin flip is better than their models. Because we only care about the current election, not a sequence of 1000 elections (which will not happen, by the way).

softwaredoug2• 2 months ago

We should have a drinking game in Nate Silver thread anyone complains about 2016 prediction. Then everyone piles on to point out how probabilities work.

ninth_ant2• 2 months ago

It wasn't even a complaint, just a personal anecdote to help share some context as to why the site may have failed to retain consumer interest post-2016.

But yes I'll join you with the liver damage and drink 17 shots.

MostlyStable• 2 months ago

I long ago stopped commenting on threads (in /r/CFB) about the SP+ college football model because it go so, so, so tiring correcting the exact same misunderstandings about things as fundamental as what the model was even purporting to do let alone, how it worked. It is incredibly disheartening to me to see the staggering level of statistical illiteracy on display in any online conversation about a statistical model. I've come to the conclusion that it's not worth my, or any one else's time. I'm glad these things exist, and the communities who want them will self select. It's not use trying to convert haters.

reed12342• 2 months ago

That’s like saying “there was only a 30 percent chance of rain today and it rained, so I will never look at the weather forecast again.”

topaz0• 2 months ago

As a younger man I would have been with the commenters mansplaining probability, but I've aged into realizing that thinking of the election like a marble pulled from an urn whose contents we have probed with polling is just as bad as thinking of it as deterministic. The reason people read fivethirtyeight, probability-savvy or not, was almost entirely to be told what was going to happen, which is sort of incompatible with feeling you can do anything about it. In that way it's probably worse than old-fashioned pundit-driven horse race coverage because it has an air of scientific authority.

baubino• 2 months ago

Huh. I first started listening to 538 in the run-up to the 2016 election and started really paying attention to them precisely because their 30% figure was so much higher than all the other polls. It was shocking to me then (and still is now reading your comment) that people didn’t seem to understand that 30% in the context of that particular election and that particular candidate suggested a remarkably high chance of winning, not a really low chance of winning. It’s a strange thing where people seem to think that less than 50% = not happening.

albedoa• 2 months ago

Call it emotional, naive, unfair or whatever you want

We would need a pass from the mods lol.

cm20122• 2 months ago

If you use 538 data, on average you make money betting. Its more correct than not

NeutralCrane• 2 months ago

Hard to believe that even 10 years later, people who don’t understand probability are still hung up on an event with a 30% chance of happening, happening.

carlcortright• 2 months ago

This is quite sad.

grebc• 2 months ago

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

ChrisArchitect• 2 months ago

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

sbxfree• 2 months 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.theda...

jerlam• 2 months ago

RIP 538's burrito bracket from 2014

Traster2• 2 months 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_WVGG2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Interesting in learning more - what bill is this that was passed by Clinton?

ascagnel_2• 2 months 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.

panda88888812• 2 months 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.

applfanboysbgon7• 2 months 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?

panda88888812• 2 months 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.

JuniperMesos2• 2 months ago

I wouldn't say unprofessional, because this isn't a normal employer-employee relationship. Nate Silver is a famous professional, he made a business deal with a large media corporation, he made some money; later that large media corporation used the IP he sold them in arguably-bad ways, and he's upset. I don't blame him for being upset, certainly I don't think he owes Disney anything, but at the same time he's the one who agreed to sell his IP to a corporation and this is the kind of things corporations do with IP.

panda88888812• 2 months ago

You hit the nail on the head with your last sentence -- he agreed to sell to a big corp, and this is the kind of thing big corps do. I get that it's unfortunate, but this is the kind of thing you have to anticipate when you sell a business.

pupppet2• 2 months 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.

applfanboysbgon7• 2 months ago

He literally said he made the wrong choice by choosing ESPN, so he's in agreement with you.

pupppet2• 2 months 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).

panda88888812• 2 months 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.

jmyeet• 2 months 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.

zombittack• 2 months 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.

applfanboysbgon7• 2 months 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.

shermantanktop2• 2 months 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.

pclmulqdq2• 2 months ago

The "virtue signaling" is signaling being a scrappy creative type who regrets/disliked the path he followed when he actually sold out to a big conglomerate at the first possible opportunity. The virtues being signaled are things like independence and grit.

fasterik• 2 months ago

There's value in making more people aware of something, even if it appears obvious to you. It's possible that someone who doesn't share your views on Disney, or corporations more broadly, might have been familiar with FiveThirtyEight and will have their views changed by Nate Silver's account of the situation. There's also nothing wrong with someone reflecting on something they worked on for over a decade and identifying things they could have done differently.

Ironically, your comment adds nothing to the discussion other than virtue signaling that you're "in the know" on this subject.

halJordan• 2 months ago

I'll disagree. As an open forum, all responses are allowed, even telling someone to sleep in the bed they made.

But it does bring up a good point. That too many people are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Any reasonable person does, or ought to know, the cycle 538 went through. And we need to stop giving the benefit of the doubt to reasonable people who say "well I'm the one who didn't"

panda88888812• 2 months ago

I wrote this exact comment elsewhere on the thread and got downvoted for it. Business is business! It sucks for Nate but he's acting like a sore loser, when this is a totally normal and expected outcome. Businesses acquire other businesses and sunset them all the time. Zero sympathy from me.

macintux2• 2 months ago

Sore losers don’t generally write at length about their own mistakes and poor decisions that led to the ultimate demise of their baby.

mohamedkoubaa• 2 months ago

You don't need to have sympathy to accept that these chimp outs are virtuous for entirely pedagogical reasons.

freediddy• 2 months ago

Cue the Mad Men meme: "THAT'S WHAT THE MONEY'S FOR!"

jredwards• 2 months ago

I think you can both be sad that something you built was destroyed, and also aware that you already sold it and are not somehow personally a victim.

bambax• 2 months ago

This comment is maybe a little too aggressive but I kind of share the sentiment. Mostly, after reading this long article, I'm surprised he never quite explains why he never tried to go at it independently? He says

I’ve always had a fairly entrepreneurial spirit

but that doesn't square well with being a cog in the huge Disney machine.

Bratmon2• 2 months ago

He's been independent since 2023

sixtyj• 2 months ago

His book is really good reads indeed.

Sometimes you get an offer that is financially irresistible. And after thousands of hours of hard work you finally get some reward.

Betrayed? That’s why people have lawyers to let them draft really good contract proposal so they aren’t ripped off.

But public whining is somehow a common tactic for getting attention online :)

johnnyanmac2• 2 months ago

But public whining is somehow a common tactic for getting attention online :)

Because it works. Not all the time, but a significant number of times. Public backlash from a fanbase is a lot cheaper than a legal battle.

We're well into the attention economy these days. I don't blame someone for using the tools society dealt out to its effect.

smcin2• 2 months ago

Moreover, under Silver's deal with Disney for 2013-8 he "retained ownership of his proprietary models.... Disney owned the brand, the IP, and the archive" [0]. Then apparently in 2018 that arrangement expired and Silver decided to leave. Now in 2026 Disney deleted the archive without announcement.

So it sounds messy, but I don't understand Silver's complaint: what did he lose now in 2026, if he had 5 years to back things up starting in 2013? Is he complaining that he lost legal rights to use his IP? or never retained a license to his IP? surely not that Disney physically deleted the archive, 8-13 years later in 2026, why would that even affect him? NYT still has archives of his work from 2010-3. (or was it the SEO effect of the backlinks from the 2013-8 archive?)

Also, he had a choice whether to sell to sports website The Athletic or Disney (The Atlantic was a third interested party but didn't bid). In [0] he says:

We came quite close to securing a deal with The Athletic... the potential deal with The Athletic hit a last-minute snafu, which there might have been time to work around if there hadn’t been a hard deadline imposed by Disney, but Disney needed a decision from us.

(Well who's responsible for that negotiation, if not him? Anyway how do we know The Athletic deal wouldn't have gone south eventually too, after a decade?)

In any case it's quite possible that with media consolidation, the archives of his models (for 2014, 2016, 2018 elections) would or will go away eventually. In which case, what's the lesson learned about licensing or retaining non-exclusive rights to his own past work? I only see his complaint, no lesson-learned about what he should have done. And even if he sold/relinquished all rights to it back in 2018, I don't see why he couldn't have had someone else clean-code and replicate that work. (Like the days of x86 licenses, or other blackbox reverse-engineering.)

(I try to avoid the term "virtue signaling" on HN regardless when it is/isn't merited, it seems to raise the temperature of the resulting discussion and move it away from the facts, it tends to get read as an ad-hominem).

[0] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/nate-silver-rev...

crazypyro2• 2 months 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.

panda88888812• 2 months 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• 2 months 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.

pclmulqdq2• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Same effect as Killed By Google.

shalmanese• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Nothing costs $8 in a corporate setting.

rwmj• 2 months 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.

softwaredoug2• 2 months ago

The real problem is that FiveThirtyEight wasn’t run as an independent P&L. They didn’t have autonomy to make business / product decisions like as Nate says putting up a paywall etc. they were treated as pure creatives.

The real lesson for both sides is to not divorce “creatives” from the business. Arguably that’s one of the biggest mistakes of legacy media and why platforms like YouTube have been so successful: creatives run the business. There’s not a long complicated feedback loop between creatives / business decisions.

omot• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

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

Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

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