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>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.

> 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.

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

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.

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

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

> 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.

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...

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.
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 :)

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

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.

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.
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.

Same effect as Killed By Google.
> 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.

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.
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.

> 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.

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.

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."

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.
> 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.

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.
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.

What a delightfully educational article on how the corporate world works
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…

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.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48152553
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.
RIP 538's burrito bracket from 2014
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.

If you cared so much about it, why did you sell it?
This is quite sad.
It’s what happened to Star Wars. Figures.
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.

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.

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