> 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.
If they feel it's damaging to have it public, then it could be argued that selling it would be irresponsible. I'm not arguing it is or it isn't, but reputation has value and management of it is part of what shareholders expect.
ABC's shareholders are Disney. Whatever Nate offered them isn't even a rounding error in Disney's $36 billion dollars in profits last year. The shareholders aren't going to care.
It's not that a shareholder won't care, but that the modern US company is such a large basket of businesses, it's impossible to put any pressure on a random business unit throwing money away. So, in practice, there's very little pressure to do things right, and a lot of pressure to do what your boss prefers, whether it actually helps the company's profitability or not. There can be negatives if you are doing massive damage to the company's image, but even then, ABC has done more than a little bit of that over the last couple of years to no ill effects. Just ask Kimmel.
I'm not defending them or this behaviour but it sounds to me like they may think the message/threat this sends to silence future criticism from other people, outweighs the immediate sum.
(Internally I'm sure they could probably phrase it some other less negative way such as chance of people confusing the brand as still owned by them, etc) association
No, what insulates them from fiduciary responsibility is the fact that there is no fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. I’ll say that again: members and/or managers of an LLC, and officers and directors of a corporation owe no fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to make them money. The fiduciary duties owed under US law are as follows: 1) the duty to be informed; 2) the duty not to usurp corporate opportunities.
As far as I can tell the fiduciary duty to make money for the shareholders is something that Jack Welsh of GE said enough times that people remembered it. However, I’m always interested in additional details concerning the history of this meme, and happy to learn more.
No. People have weird beliefs about what fiduciary duty means. It does not mean that companies are required at all intervals to maximize revenue or profit.
Dunno - is protecting yourself from high-profile criticism by doing whatever you want with assets you 100% own and are under no contractual obligation to share ... also in fiduciary duty?
the easy argument otherwise would be that if they sold the IP, they wouldnt be able to revive it in the future, and also they would have nate silver as a competitor in the space
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.
this is what the salesforces of the world do to startups every day. it is so painful to watch. billions upon billions wasted for just the stupidest possible reasons.
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.
That's kind of already happened though. Nate and Galen have both launched Substack's covering much of what they did at 538. I've also seen at least 4-5 others working elsewhere doing the similar polling/politics/sports work.
Maybe that was the logic on ABC's part but it's ridiculously wrong given how much clear market demand there is for the 538 people and content.
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.
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
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 enjoyed the old 538 podcast and usually like Nate's work but didn't care at all about Risky Business. His cohost was terrible in the episodes I listened too. She managed to do a lot of talking without saying anything interesting or insightful.
Gladwell also annoys me, so that didn't help matters.
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.
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.
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)
IIRC Nate Silver (or Bronze as the kids called him) was the only poll aggregator to even give Trump "a chance", but he really went overboard afterwards arguing that he got "it right" even though clearly he was wrong.
No idea. ABC bought it and slowly has been shutting down the parts of it. They got rid of the projects page, then laid off all the folks working on it after the election, and now have gotten rid of all of the articles.
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.
No. The 'old school' hated 538 and polling wonks in general. Back in the 2000s there was a huge push back because this blog guy had numbers going against whatever narrative they were trying spin.
I feel like it proves the opposite. A small entity was able to become a valued source of information, a big entity bought it, but then was unable to do anything with it, since being a “big” media seller does not matter due to the accessibility of the internet.
Yeah they sure were bad at predictions. If only they had aggregated all their predictions and compared them to how things actually turned out in one easy assess location. That sure would have been useful..... [0]
The 70:30 prediction against Trump was far better than most. I did see models back then that considered the state polls mostly or entirely uncorrelated, and those produced obviously garbage with 90% or even 99% in favor of Clinton.
But in the end people pick on Nate because he really enjoys being an asshole on the internet. It's far more about when he acts as a pundit, not as an expert on statistics.
I think given the number of things that can happen with ~30% probability, there's probably something significant happening with ~30% probability at basically all times.
Well, we're talking about elections. You have an election where there's a president, 30 or so governors, 33-34 senators, and 438 representatives. Say a total of 64 major offices, or 500 if you count the representatives. You'd expect a 30% chance to happen in 19 major races, or 150 races if you count the representatives.
So in an election, that happens all the time. It just doesn't always happen in the race for president.
Where Presidential politics is concerned, I think it's less a case of misunderstanding probabilities and more the success of party propaganda. Every victory is a landslide with a resounding mandate from the populace, every defeat a crushing humiliation and repudiation of your opponent's Unamerican ideals.
I kind of fell off the Nate Silver train toward the end of Trump's first term (so deep in the COVID-19 era...). It feels like around that time 538 shifted heavily away from raw statistics and into punditry, and they seemed less unique among the various political blogs.
Those predictions all became worthless anyway when Comey reopened the "emails" issue right before the election and threw fresh meat to all the stupid people who ate that up.
> 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.
Wow. I have a low opinion of ABC as I said in another post, but this level of pettiness is still surprising to me.
It’s basically a fuck you to the shareholders. Hey we’ve got this dead asset someone will pay for but we won’t sell because they were mean to us.
Any exec who operates that way should be shown the door ASAP as they are likely doing similar emotional management of other aspects of the business.
If they feel it's damaging to have it public, then it could be argued that selling it would be irresponsible. I'm not arguing it is or it isn't, but reputation has value and management of it is part of what shareholders expect.
ABC's shareholders are Disney. Whatever Nate offered them isn't even a rounding error in Disney's $36 billion dollars in profits last year. The shareholders aren't going to care.
It's not that a shareholder won't care, but that the modern US company is such a large basket of businesses, it's impossible to put any pressure on a random business unit throwing money away. So, in practice, there's very little pressure to do things right, and a lot of pressure to do what your boss prefers, whether it actually helps the company's profitability or not. There can be negatives if you are doing massive damage to the company's image, but even then, ABC has done more than a little bit of that over the last couple of years to no ill effects. Just ask Kimmel.
> shareholders are Disney
Who's shareholders are the public.
> The shareholders aren't going to care
This is not a valid defense in court. You can't let "attitude of investors" override "sound financial decisionmaking."
I'm not defending them or this behaviour but it sounds to me like they may think the message/threat this sends to silence future criticism from other people, outweighs the immediate sum.
(Internally I'm sure they could probably phrase it some other less negative way such as chance of people confusing the brand as still owned by them, etc) association
Disney's 2025 profit was $12B:
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-inc...
So what amount of profits insulates you from lack of fiduciary responsibility?
"It's okay set millions of dollars on fire because we have billions in this pile over here!"
No, what insulates them from fiduciary responsibility is the fact that there is no fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. I’ll say that again: members and/or managers of an LLC, and officers and directors of a corporation owe no fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders to make them money. The fiduciary duties owed under US law are as follows: 1) the duty to be informed; 2) the duty not to usurp corporate opportunities.
As far as I can tell the fiduciary duty to make money for the shareholders is something that Jack Welsh of GE said enough times that people remembered it. However, I’m always interested in additional details concerning the history of this meme, and happy to learn more.
(The first person to observe that an LLC has no shareholders gets a lawyer high five).
WOuldn't proof of that be some grounds for breach of fiduciary duty?
No. People have weird beliefs about what fiduciary duty means. It does not mean that companies are required at all intervals to maximize revenue or profit.
Dunno - is protecting yourself from high-profile criticism by doing whatever you want with assets you 100% own and are under no contractual obligation to share ... also in fiduciary duty?
It is not illegal to be petty during business negotiations.
the easy argument otherwise would be that if they sold the IP, they wouldnt be able to revive it in the future, and also they would have nate silver as a competitor in the space
Nope. There is really no case law to support such a legal theory.
Just register fivethirtynine.com and don't look back.
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.
this is what the salesforces of the world do to startups every day. it is so painful to watch. billions upon billions wasted for just the stupidest possible reasons.
at least they aren't inefficient, like governments are. Because as you can clearly see market forces always lead to optimal resource allocations.
Like the billions invested in AI???
Pretty sure forlorn_mammoth had an implied /s in their post.
Hope so.
On the other hand, it's nice for the people receiving those paychecks (at least while they're still receiving them).
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.
That's kind of already happened though. Nate and Galen have both launched Substack's covering much of what they did at 538. I've also seen at least 4-5 others working elsewhere doing the similar polling/politics/sports work.
Maybe that was the logic on ABC's part but it's ridiculously wrong given how much clear market demand there is for the 538 people and content.
> That's kind of already happened though.
It's a world of difference to the political standing of the ABC Vice President between "Nate Silver launched something and made a gazillion dollars" vs "Nate Silver bought FiveThirtyEight back for a song and made a gazillion dollars" even if Nate Silver did the exact same thing. In the second case, the ABC Vice President gets fired because he signed off on the purchase.
This is why long copyright is such a terrible idea. With long copyright, there is every incentive to sit on IP and do nothing with it because of political losses. With short copyright, the incentive is to do something quick because the copyright will expire otherwise.
Really sad to see some of the best visualizations I've ever seen in my life being taken down. I've easily spent hours exploring playing with their gun deaths visualization, p-hacking piece, gut microbiome explorable explainer and many others.
Guess we better back up their GitHub repos before that gets taken down as well
https://github.com/fivethirtyeight
they took down the burrito bracket, it must be resurrected
when i lived in SF i found al pastor at Tacqueria Cancun messianic
If you sell out don't expect to control future events.
Fax. It’s amazing how many “leaders” fail to see that in exchange for the payout.
Fair enough, but you can still observe and make comments about them.
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 enjoyed the old 538 podcast and usually like Nate's work but didn't care at all about Risky Business. His cohost was terrible in the episodes I listened too. She managed to do a lot of talking without saying anything interesting or insightful.
Gladwell also annoys me, so that didn't help matters.
How did they do that? How do you lose access to your own website?
Major news sites can just lean into mathwashing their political opinions pages and call it any random number they like.
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.
https://www.natesilver.net/
i was a casual reader of 538 back in the day. his substack feels pretty similar, if smaller in scope.
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.
I remember that whole election starting off very poorly for Nate Silver.
After reading this book, The Party Decides https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo592160... , he was a big advocate of the idea that the "endorsement race" of state officials and unelected party leaders.
There was a whole "Party Decides: Endorsement Tracker" graphic and everything, but Trump securing the Republican nomination and eventually the presidency pretty conclusively showed that theory to be a relic of the past.
So the 538 election coverage that year was: - Party endorsements matter more than early polling (they didn't) - Hillary's up so big there's no way Trump can win (he did, and yes I know they didn't actually say that but that's what the layman saw)
(ironically the Party Decides thesis seems to have correctly predicted events in the Democratic primary that year)
IIRC Nate Silver (or Bronze as the kids called him) was the only poll aggregator to even give Trump "a chance", but he really went overboard afterwards arguing that he got "it right" even though clearly he was wrong.
But why?
Nate Silver has some pretty good commentary on it all on his X account (https://x.com/NateSilver538).
A link for those of us without twitter accounts.
https://xcancel.com/NateSilver538
No idea. ABC bought it and slowly has been shutting down the parts of it. They got rid of the projects page, then laid off all the folks working on it after the election, and now have gotten rid of all of the articles.
Fortunately the Github is still up: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight
> Fortunately the Github is still up
I need to mirror everything to keep it accessible when they decide to shut this down, too?
I loved that site, and referred people to it frequently.
I'm surprised this is news - or perhaps just surprised that there was still some of 538 around ...?
ABC officially sunset 538 over a year ago (and laid off most/all of the staff).
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 was sunset over a year ago.
538 had a really accessible portal that evaluated the quality of pollsters. It made it very easy to know which polls were low-quality and therefore ignorable. It being an election year, it’s possible someone didn’t like their pollster rating. Thankfully, we still have Internet Archive.
Edit: nm it was definitely the burrito battle royale bracket. Big burrito couldn’t handle the truth being revealed about their restaurants.
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.
No. The 'old school' hated 538 and polling wonks in general. Back in the 2000s there was a huge push back because this blog guy had numbers going against whatever narrative they were trying spin.
I feel like it proves the opposite. A small entity was able to become a valued source of information, a big entity bought it, but then was unable to do anything with it, since being a “big” media seller does not matter due to the accessibility of the internet.
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?
Yeah they sure were bad at predictions. If only they had aggregated all their predictions and compared them to how things actually turned out in one easy assess location. That sure would have been useful..... [0]
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250306183754/https://projects....
538 was actually pretty accurate!
They had a good article about how their predictions were much better than you'd expect, but obviously I can't link it anymore because ABC removed it.
Did he predict odds? How are you so sure his odds were wrong?
The 70:30 prediction against Trump was far better than most. I did see models back then that considered the state polls mostly or entirely uncorrelated, and those produced obviously garbage with 90% or even 99% in favor of Clinton.
But in the end people pick on Nate because he really enjoys being an asshole on the internet. It's far more about when he acts as a pundit, not as an expert on statistics.
People consistently have a hard time understanding that 30% probabilities happen all the time.
Surely not all the time.
I think given the number of things that can happen with ~30% probability, there's probably something significant happening with ~30% probability at basically all times.
Well, we're talking about elections. You have an election where there's a president, 30 or so governors, 33-34 senators, and 438 representatives. Say a total of 64 major offices, or 500 if you count the representatives. You'd expect a 30% chance to happen in 19 major races, or 150 races if you count the representatives.
So in an election, that happens all the time. It just doesn't always happen in the race for president.
30% of the time it is all of the time.
Some say 30% of the time.
Where Presidential politics is concerned, I think it's less a case of misunderstanding probabilities and more the success of party propaganda. Every victory is a landslide with a resounding mandate from the populace, every defeat a crushing humiliation and repudiation of your opponent's Unamerican ideals.
I kind of fell off the Nate Silver train toward the end of Trump's first term (so deep in the COVID-19 era...). It feels like around that time 538 shifted heavily away from raw statistics and into punditry, and they seemed less unique among the various political blogs.
Those predictions all became worthless anyway when Comey reopened the "emails" issue right before the election and threw fresh meat to all the stupid people who ate that up.
This isn't about Nate's articles (although perhaps those are gone as well).