--Nate Silver (538 founder)
ABC seem pretty petty here.
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.
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.
Guess we better back up their GitHub repos before that gets taken down as well
when i lived in SF i found al pastor at Tacqueria Cancun messianic
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gladwell also annoys me, so that didn't help matters.
<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.
I occasionally read articles on Nate Silver's substack but I'm still missing the breadth of 538conbined with the trademark data-driven analysis.
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.
i was a casual reader of 538 back in the day. his substack feels pretty similar, if smaller in scope.
Fortunately the Github is still up: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight
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.
ABC officially sunset 538 over a year ago (and laid off most/all of the staff).
Sometimes companies acquire upcoming competitors specifically to shut them down so that existing cash cow product lines can continue.
Edit: nm it was definitely the burrito battle royale bracket. Big burrito couldn’t handle the truth being revealed about their restaurants.
I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot poll.
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.
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.
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)
