alt Hacker NewsABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
If you sell out don't expect to control future events.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Major news sites can just lean into mathwashing their political opinions pages and call it any random number they like.
How did they do that? How do you lose access to your own website?
ABC has opted to step on Thucydides Trap.
Oh NO, that's probably the best infographic news sites I was keep visiting and learn
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.
What were the odds of ABC News taking all FiveThirtyEight articles offline?
I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot poll.
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.
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.
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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.
Nate Silver - the guy who pushed so, so hard for Hillary during the 2016 election.
This makes no sense. Sure, he got nearly every prediction wrong but so have their meteorologists. Why just pick on poor ol' Nate?
> 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.