alt.hn

5/15/2026 at 7:07:08 PM

ABC News has taken all FiveThirtyEight articles offline

 https://twitter.com/baseballot/status/2055309076209492208

by cmsparks

5/15/2026 at 7:53:54 PM

> 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.

by applfanboysbgon

5/15/2026 at 11:47:54 PM

So Nate & Co sell out to a big corporation then are upset that it does big corporation stuff? I'm more mad at Nate here because 538 was my go-to for political coverage pre-sellout, and because of his greed it went away.

by queuebert

5/16/2026 at 1:05:34 AM

538 had some decent years through its various sellout phases and imo hit its peak after Nate Silver left - he'd long since exposed himself more as a contrarian than a serious analyst and had become a real detriment to the brand.

It was definitely sad to lose 538 how we did, but G Elliott Morris has really stepped up to continue the spirit on his Strength in Numbers blog. It's the best data-driven US politics reporting out there right now imo. He also contributes to Fifty Plus One with Mary Radcliffe, and that's excellent too, reminiscent of the old 538 polling roundup stuff that went beyond just core US politics. Recently he started a podcast with David Nir of The Downballot, which is another solid resource for lower level races.

by alisonatwork

5/16/2026 at 2:05:12 AM

Clare Malone era of FIVE THIRTY EIGHT was among the most serious political journalism out there.

by wnc3141

5/16/2026 at 8:50:07 PM

[flagged]

by mr-pink

5/16/2026 at 12:29:51 AM

Whatever you feel about his actions that was at worst it was a win-lose decision. He benefited from it.

If his comment is accurate, then ABC’s decision is a clear lose-lose decision driven entirely by personal spite.

by adjejmxbdjdn

5/16/2026 at 12:42:40 AM

Honestly is Nate even wrong here?

IIRC, he got to keep all of the models and etc from 538 which is kinda all that mattered about it. Like anybody is really going to lookup the 2016 election in 2030 but they're definitely want the model's output in 2030 for 2030.

Management seems to be clearly inept and if somebody wants to give you a wheelbarrow of cash for something worthless you're generally foolish to not accept.

by lesuorac

5/16/2026 at 3:16:17 AM

I don’t think that’s all that mattered. FiveThirtyEight was a strong brand, it was definitely worth something.

by afavour

5/16/2026 at 4:08:19 AM

I still own a Fivey the Fox t-shirt

by derektank

5/16/2026 at 6:10:32 AM

He never sold the prediction models, and only leased them to ABC/538, so they left with him as he left the company.

by Hamuko

5/16/2026 at 1:11:06 PM

It's petty even for a corporation. It's not exactly maximizing shareholder value. But yeah, it's the sort of stuff corporations (especially media corporations) can be expected to do.

I think Nate has become better at this sort of stuff in recent years. But still, he said that Disney "hardly ever" interfered in their editorial process, oblivious to the implication.

(What it means is that Disney/ABC were perfectly willing to interfere in their editorial process, but rarely needed to since Nate said what they wanted him to say anyway).

by vintermann

5/16/2026 at 3:54:30 PM

How can we jump to that conclusion? Maybe they were only willing to interfere in that process in extreme cases.

by ownlife

5/17/2026 at 6:22:11 AM

What would that look like? Can you see a concrete scenario where it was somehow justified by ABC Disney to interfere in 538's editorial process?

There's not much extreme about Nate Silver.

by vintermann

5/16/2026 at 2:56:04 AM

Just follow the man, not the brand. He’s still doing his thing: https://www.natesilver.net/

by bfung

5/16/2026 at 3:05:49 AM

But he kind of sucks and isn’t worth following.

He’s a sellout at heart, including his recent association with Polymarket.

Someone cool would have never sold out a website as good as 538 used to be. Now he’s more interested in profiting off of gamblers.

by dangus

5/16/2026 at 4:07:26 AM

538 has basically always been a licensed product, first with the NYT in 2010, and then with ESPN/ABC/Disney since they left the NYT in 2013. There were only 2 years where it was an independent blog

by derektank

5/16/2026 at 4:25:54 AM

538 got one election right a decade and a half ago with a contrarian alternative data source, and hooked a bunch of partisan gamblers since

now you can actually bet on your beliefs and dont need to debate with anyone on whether the koolaid colored wave of choice will actually happen, or whether you are a slave to an algorithm induced hall of mirrors. note, the senate has been 50-50 for over a decade, its probably the latter

so the only intervention necessary here is on yourself, focusing on things you cant control while delusionally thinking this time will be different, over and over and over again

extracting value from partisan gullibility and pathetic power struggles is unironically the move

by yieldcrv

5/16/2026 at 4:04:28 PM

There's no "getting elections right"; these models just estimate probability. They gave Trump a 29% change in 2016 -- that's almost 1 in 3!

A better way to assess accuracy would be to bin predictions (0-10% chance, 10-20% chance, etc.) and see if the observed frequency aligns with the predictions.

by ownlife

5/16/2026 at 4:13:54 PM

I like market based approaches as a signal and opportunity creation, price discovery

In parallel your signal could be a data source adding to individuals contribution to price discovery

by yieldcrv

5/16/2026 at 5:59:43 AM

Pretty sure the only election that 538 didn't correctly call was 2016. For sure they correctly predicted both Obama wins and Biden.

by stackghost

5/16/2026 at 8:31:56 AM

They don't really 'call' elections since they only publish probabilities. If you'd bet on the candidate 538/Silver was more bullish than the bookies, then the only election year you wouldn't have made money would have been 2024.

by owisd

5/16/2026 at 3:55:59 AM

You do realize the person responsible for 538 is the same person?

by jimbokun

5/16/2026 at 5:17:27 AM

People change over time. The Nate Silver of 2026 isn't the same Nate Silver of 2010 or 2013.

by fragmede

5/16/2026 at 5:36:38 AM

That's a funny response in the context of "Now he’s more interested in profiting off of gamblers" given I remember posting with him on the 2+2 forums in the early aughts poker boom days where he was a popular poster teaching a lot of people how to profit off gamblers.

by furyofantares

5/16/2026 at 6:24:44 AM

2+2 is great. Still go check on casino megathreads if I wanna play somewhere in a new town

by matltc

5/16/2026 at 6:26:01 AM

See also his new book versus his old. His new book is nothing but name-dropping.

by jazzpush2

5/16/2026 at 4:56:36 AM

… yes, that’s why he mentioned that he isn’t cool for selling 538…

by kortilla

5/16/2026 at 2:22:04 PM

Yes that’s literally what I’m talking about. He made a cool site, sold it off to get enshittified, and now his main gig is grifting off of polymarket.

by dangus

5/16/2026 at 5:28:59 PM

> then are upset that it does big corporation stuff

Parent says because they “criticized our management of the brand”.

Big corporations don’t give a crap. They are 100% about the bottom line.

This isn’t “big corporation” behavior.

by fn-mote

5/16/2026 at 1:54:18 AM

I understand your frustration, but greed? He didn't owe you anything. So what if he cashed out?

by Hnrobert42

5/16/2026 at 9:41:34 AM

"Upset" is far from what happened here.

by marysol5

5/16/2026 at 12:20:47 AM

Your annoyance is understandable, but it's worth remembering: he is not your slave. He does not exist to do things for you. His providing you with something good for a time does not obligate him to provide it to you forever. Because he is not your slave.

by returningfory2

5/17/2026 at 12:14:29 AM

You are quite correct. I'm also free to dislike him for his choices.

by queuebert

5/16/2026 at 5:54:20 AM

[dead]

by aaron695

5/16/2026 at 12:22:41 AM

[flagged]

by jaredhansen

5/15/2026 at 7:56:48 PM

Wow. I have a low opinion of ABC as I said in another post, but this level of pettiness is still surprising to me.

by rurp

5/15/2026 at 8:00:08 PM

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.

by brookst

5/15/2026 at 8:29:08 PM

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.

by SoftTalker

5/16/2026 at 12:53:53 AM

But this isn’t reputation management. This is retribution for past affronts. This action in no way retroactively protects them from what was said.

by brookst

5/16/2026 at 1:35:26 AM

I think he's just saying the case they would make to avoid being sued for breaching their fiduciary responsibility. Not that it's the actual reason. But Idk.

by jakderrida

5/16/2026 at 12:59:31 AM

It's hard to imagine how it could be damaging to ABC to have it public under someone else's brand.

by Dylan16807

5/15/2026 at 8:39:19 PM

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.

by jfengel

5/15/2026 at 8:57:22 PM

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.

by hibikir

5/16/2026 at 6:40:52 AM

>impossible to put any pressure on a random business unit throwing money away ... very little pressure to do things right ... pressure to do what your boss prefers, whether it [helps] profitability

This is frustrating as a consumer. Any further insight, on the solution side?

by Barbing

5/15/2026 at 8:59:30 PM

Disney's 2025 profit was $12B:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DIS/disney/net-inc...

by lotsofpulp

5/16/2026 at 12:39:13 AM

Accuracy is important. Thank you for the correction.

$12B profit is obscenely large.

by margalabargala

5/16/2026 at 1:13:05 PM

Is it? What is the reason to assume an arbitrary number of a currency is "obscene", without taking into account changes in purchasing power of the currency, number of employees, number of customers, amount of expenses, volatility of the business, time horizon of investment, and myriad other factors?

by lotsofpulp

5/16/2026 at 1:27:49 PM

The size of it concentrated in one place.

by margalabargala

5/16/2026 at 1:36:49 PM

What does one place mean? Disney sells access to media and entertainment all over the world, to billions of people.

Regardless, a single metric is almost never sufficient to provide a well rounded analysis of anything.

by lotsofpulp

5/16/2026 at 1:43:07 PM

I suspect you'll be able to figure it out if you thunk for a moment! When we're talking about the profits of one corporation, what do you think it might mean when someone says the profits go to "one place"?

I know it can be confusing that many places exist and that the corporation has multiple customers.

by margalabargala

5/15/2026 at 9:13:16 PM

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!"

by themafia

5/16/2026 at 1:05:51 AM

The concept of fiduciary duty is an economic professors fantasy. When the shareholders of WB voted against David Zaslovs extraordinary 800m pay package the board ignored it. That's the "owners" voting to not give a crazy gift to the guy who was CEO for like 3 years and incredibly well paid.

by georgeecollins

5/15/2026 at 10:00:23 PM

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.

by singleshot_

5/15/2026 at 10:25:41 PM

This is true in some states, like Texas; but not in Delaware where Disney is incorporated and where directors and officers owe fiduciary duties of care and loyalty to both the corporation and the shareholders.

(Not legal advice. I'm not licensed in either state.)

by mminer237

5/15/2026 at 10:30:35 PM

You are correct to note that there are two fiduciary duties: the duty of care, and the duty of loyalty. However, you are incorrect to imply I stated the law incorrectly.

The duty of care is otherwise known as the duty to be informed. And the duty of loyalty is otherwise known as the duty not to usurp corporate opportunities. I stated the law in Delaware, which is consistent with the law on the rest of the United States on these points.

You and I simply use two different sets of words to describe the only two fiduciary duties of an officer.

by singleshot_

5/15/2026 at 11:42:38 PM

None of those mean "duty to make money for the shareholders" though.

by triceratops

5/15/2026 at 10:02:20 PM

(The first person to observe that an LLC has no shareholders gets a lawyer high five).

by singleshot_

5/16/2026 at 12:54:27 AM

Hence my point of “if they’re doing this, they are likely making other emotional, anti-shareholder decisions”

by brookst

5/15/2026 at 9:11:42 PM

> 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."

by themafia

5/15/2026 at 9:20:58 PM

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

by slipheen

5/15/2026 at 8:05:34 PM

WOuldn't proof of that be some grounds for breach of fiduciary duty?

by eugenekolo

5/15/2026 at 8:31:14 PM

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.

by tptacek

5/15/2026 at 11:33:36 PM

You must not have spent much time looking at derivative lawsuits if you think this is weird. Anyway if ABC could convincingly classify this as a business decision, e.g., a question of the maintaining goodwill, maybe they're OK. If this came down to some exec feeling personally insulted, like the quote hints, a classic breach of fiduciary duty.

by jasonfarnon

5/15/2026 at 8:18:03 PM

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?

by jvanderbot

5/15/2026 at 8:27:18 PM

It is not illegal to be petty during business negotiations.

by minimaxir

5/16/2026 at 2:42:01 AM

Why? Even if the common myth that public company executives must maximize profits at all costs were true, it's easy to construct a plausible explanation for why one might believe in good faith that destroying 538 rather than selling it is the best strategy to maximize profits. For example, because they think the profit they'd lose from 538 competing with their own politics offerings outweighs the amount Silver would pay for it.

by umanwizard

5/16/2026 at 6:36:46 AM

Isn't the checkers level move to make 539 and call it a day? Sure, it's no longer about electors but ... checkers.

... and to think I thought I was being clever. I see this has been suggested already.

by opello

5/15/2026 at 9:05:00 PM

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

by 8note

5/15/2026 at 8:17:18 PM

Nope. There is really no case law to support such a legal theory.

by nradov

5/15/2026 at 10:01:45 PM

Just register fivethirtynine.com and don't look back.

by TurdF3rguson

5/16/2026 at 3:11:54 AM

"I won't sell at any price" reads as an invitation to make a much higher bid.

It seems silly at best to take that as a literal statement.

by donkyrf

5/15/2026 at 7:55:00 PM

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.

by rurp

5/15/2026 at 11:25:24 PM

Companies have a long history of mis-management of their acquisitions (and mis-managing their portfolio of projects outside their money-making expertise).

As you suggest, it's good that the alumni seem to be doing fine, although Harry Enten's commentary on CNN is not as thougtful as he was on 538 podcasts.

by aworks

5/16/2026 at 2:25:12 PM

It's crazy. CBS has likely killed 'CBS News', '60 Minutes', and 'The Late Show', three brands worth likely billions if handled correctly. It's like they are scared of retaliation or something, allowing these brands to be destroyed for zero value in exchange. I've never seen anything like it in a free and open market.

by jaybrendansmith

5/16/2026 at 4:01:58 AM

The 538 brand focusing on the quantitative aspects of politics and sports should have been massive in this age of omnipresent prediction markets and betting apps.

by jimbokun

5/15/2026 at 8:03:24 PM

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.

by keeganpoppen

5/15/2026 at 8:27:51 PM

at least they aren't inefficient, like governments are. Because as you can clearly see market forces always lead to optimal resource allocations.

by forlorn_mammoth

5/15/2026 at 8:47:46 PM

Like the billions invested in AI???

by msie

5/15/2026 at 9:31:01 PM

Pretty sure forlorn_mammoth had an implied /s in their post.

by hungryhobbit

5/15/2026 at 9:36:52 PM

Hope so.

by bayindirh

5/16/2026 at 11:04:27 PM

Some governments are inefficient…

by Danox

5/16/2026 at 2:11:43 AM

Let's also take a moment to begrudge how government's guiding mission isn't to reap profit off its citizens. Are you even really American if you don't want your leaders to milk you for every cent you're worth?

by not_kurt_godel

5/16/2026 at 1:20:05 AM

On the other hand, many startups don't do anything usable enough that people would pay money for, and their only 'exit strategy' is to be bought by one of those large companies and then dissolved after a year or two.

by ajsnigrutin

5/15/2026 at 8:49:00 PM

On the other hand, it's nice for the people receiving those paychecks (at least while they're still receiving them).

by herpdyderp

5/17/2026 at 2:47:24 PM

Five thirty eight's relevance in the public eye peaked about 10 years ago. They missed on the Trump 1 election so badly it's like they weren't even aiming at the target. I think that damaged their credibility in a lot of folks' minds (mine, for example). That's the problem with hitching your reputation to your predictive ability. One big miss and you're discredited, forever.

by ryukoposting

5/15/2026 at 9:04:26 PM

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

by culi

5/15/2026 at 9:51:38 PM

they took down the burrito bracket, it must be resurrected

when i lived in SF i found al pastor at Tacqueria Cancun messianic

by The_Blade

5/17/2026 at 4:58:52 AM

Their carnitas super taco was life-changing for me. Perfectly-cooked meat, generous helpings of avocado and sour cream. It was too big to fold at first, I had to eat it down to a manageable size with a fork before I could pick it up.

Still chasing that dragon to this day.

by toomanyrichies

5/15/2026 at 7:57:24 PM

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.

by spprashant

5/15/2026 at 10:29:34 PM

In theory corporate ownership was supposed to be the solution to that problem. Deep pockets to buffer through the lean years and maximally exploit the profitable content when the harvest arrives.

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.

by ajross

5/16/2026 at 4:03:40 AM

If they stayed viable into the heyday of prediction markets and betting apps they should have been printing money.

by jimbokun

5/15/2026 at 8:33:14 PM

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.

by htrp

5/15/2026 at 8:58:30 PM

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.

by rurp

5/15/2026 at 9:50:29 PM

> 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.

by bsder

5/15/2026 at 11:14:50 PM

You have a cutely naive view of what gets vice presidents fired.

by hungryhobbit

5/15/2026 at 8:18:12 PM

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.

by rconti

5/16/2026 at 3:16:43 PM

I unsubscribed, got tired of them endlessly droning on about who the mayor of NYC should be. Not relevant to most of the world.

by scrivna

5/15/2026 at 9:02:26 PM

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.

by rurp

5/15/2026 at 11:29:02 PM

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.

by dredmorbius

5/15/2026 at 7:44:40 PM

If you sell out don't expect to control future events.

by robtaylor

5/15/2026 at 8:34:00 PM

Fair enough, but you can still observe and make comments about them.

by Lerc

5/15/2026 at 9:58:11 PM

Fax. It’s amazing how many “leaders” fail to see that in exchange for the payout.

by sharts

5/16/2026 at 2:47:11 AM

It's just odd to see a company buy a product and then promptly nuke it.

by sambellll

5/16/2026 at 12:26:35 AM

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."

by madrox

5/16/2026 at 3:38:23 PM

At first glance that’s absurd, but if AI really does kills social media with dead internet theory then they will have been right!

by casefields

5/15/2026 at 7:53:06 PM

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.

by jimbob45

5/16/2026 at 12:42:17 AM

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.

by beart

5/16/2026 at 12:50:08 AM

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.

by patresh

5/16/2026 at 1:29:50 AM

I started doing actual politics rather than simply consuming it. It's more fun trust me.

by shimman

5/16/2026 at 1:34:54 AM

I highly recommend G Elliott Morris' blog Strength in Numbers. He exists more in conversation with political science researchers and commercial polling professionals which makes his reporting feel a lot deeper and more interesting than the back of the envelope hot takes a bunch of other pundits try to sell as data journalism these days.

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.

by alisonatwork

5/15/2026 at 9:19:30 PM

Major news sites can just lean into mathwashing their political opinions pages and call it any random number they like.

by liveoneggs

5/15/2026 at 8:49:51 PM

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.

by toyg

5/15/2026 at 8:52:34 PM

https://www.natesilver.net/

i was a casual reader of 538 back in the day. his substack feels pretty similar, if smaller in scope.

by daniel-thompson

5/15/2026 at 11:15:32 PM

There's no cool map of how America is likely to vote in the next electioon the new site :(

by hungryhobbit

5/16/2026 at 1:45:13 AM

You might enjoy some of the projects here, including a presidential approval map: https://projects.gelliottmorris.com

Maps for elections generally don't come out till a few months beforehand because there isn't enough polling data to make a meaningful prediction.

by alisonatwork

5/16/2026 at 1:31:32 AM

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.

by paulschreiber

5/15/2026 at 7:17:10 PM

But why?

by deanebarker

5/15/2026 at 7:26:42 PM

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

by cmsparks

5/15/2026 at 7:33:45 PM

> 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.

by fn-mote

5/16/2026 at 4:58:59 AM

It turns out "liberal main stream media" was always controlled by capitalists. It was never "left leaning" unless your mind was entirely warped by right wing propaganda.

by tstrimple

5/15/2026 at 7:43:43 PM

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).

by BeetleB

5/15/2026 at 11:06:42 PM

The new development is that the old articles from when the site was active have been taken offline. Normally you would leave old content online even if you're no longer making more.

by ameliaquining

5/16/2026 at 12:21:23 AM

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.

by NordStreamYacht

5/16/2026 at 12:23:09 AM

That's not what this was.

by e40

5/15/2026 at 7:42:28 PM

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.

by jmclnx

5/15/2026 at 8:00:34 PM

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.

by flomo

5/15/2026 at 7:57:00 PM

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.

by lotsofpulp

5/15/2026 at 11:54:16 PM

What were the odds of ABC News taking all FiveThirtyEight articles offline?

I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot poll.

by DonHopkins

5/15/2026 at 7:33:45 PM

ABC has opted to step on Thucydides Trap.

by Shalomboy

5/15/2026 at 7:38:55 PM

Oh NO, that's probably the best infographic news sites I was keep visiting and learn

by woodydesign

5/15/2026 at 7:41:01 PM

538 was sunset over a year ago.

by BeetleB

5/15/2026 at 11:26:26 PM

I feel like it was at least 10 years ago

by TurdF3rguson

5/15/2026 at 9:57:06 PM

How did they do that? How do you lose access to your own website?

by sharts

5/15/2026 at 10:13:57 PM

They sold it a while ago

by cobertos

5/15/2026 at 10:57:27 PM

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.

by hedora

5/15/2026 at 7:48:02 PM

[flagged]

by nyc_data_geek1

5/15/2026 at 9:25:50 PM

[flagged]

by booleandilemma

5/15/2026 at 11:03:44 PM

[flagged]

by nozzlegear

5/15/2026 at 9:01:34 PM

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.

by chasd00

5/15/2026 at 10:09:30 PM

> pretty big credibility hit after getting that election so wrong

That this is the narrative that survived the election is one of the greatest indictments for our society's ability to engage in critical thinking.

The day before the election, the Huffington Post published a hit piece criticising Nate for overrating Trump's odds and inspiring panic. Huffpost predicted a 98.2% chance of Clinton winning, NYT predicted 85%, and Nate's model dared to give her only a 65% chance of winning.

Then the election happens, Trump wins, and the credible figure who gave him the highest odds is now lambasted from the other direction. He was so wrong to give Trump a chance that the mainstream media were publishing articles about it, and he was so wrong to not give Trump a 100% chance that it ruined his reputation. The moral: you literally can't win, because people are too fucking stupid to comprehend probability, period.

538 made thousands of forecasts of events they predicted to happen 30% of the time, and those events happened 29% of the time in actuality. Does that mean they got it wrong every single one of those times a 30% event actually happened? For a forecaster to be 'correct', is it necessary for events forecasted at 30% to never happen?

by applfanboysbgon

5/15/2026 at 10:32:46 PM

Whenever people knock them for mis-calling a race, the thing I always refer to (or would, if ABC hadn't burned the site down) is their "Check Our Work" page, which sorts all of their predictions across politics, sports, etc., bucketed by the odds they gave, and then showed the percentage of all outcomes that were accurately predicted. It was remarkably accurate -- i.e., races where a candidate was given 65% odds were indeed won by that candidate approximately 65% of the time. This was true from the surefire 95% odds (which did fail about 5% of the time) down to the 5% longshots (which pulled an upset about 5% of the time).

Here's the last archived version of the page:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250306183754/https://projects....

by Jordan-117

5/15/2026 at 11:40:15 PM

Not to mention, when you use a Monte Carlo model, you can easily count the samples which lead to certain outcomes. In their review, they noted that the correlated polling miss in the Midwest was one of the most common scenarios making up that 35% chance of a Trump win.

The idea that Silver somehow 'hit' in 2012 when he correctly predicted all states and 'missed' in 2016 is so juvenile I get second hand embarrassment whenever I see it.

by kirrent

5/16/2026 at 12:10:29 AM

Normies very bad at the concept of statistical calibration. News at 11!

But yes, I agree with you that it's surprising to hear people on Hacker News having the 180 degrees wrong impression that the general population appears to have taken away from the one thing normal people care about polling for: during presidential elections.

by mercutio2

5/16/2026 at 5:03:39 AM

+1. It's insane how history has been rewritten here, though it probably helps that 95% of people don't understand what the fuck a forecast is. They translate "30% chance Trump wins" into "0% chance Trump wins" because 30 < 50. Try asking them whether they think a 45% chance of rain means it definitively isn't going to rain and hear the wind whistling through the empty space between their ears.

by caconym_

5/16/2026 at 10:56:29 AM

I think most people genuinely read "49% chance" as some kind of ironclad prediction of winning 49 out of 100 seats, and therefore losing.

That's why people get all weird about probabilities flipping from 49% to 51%, and not at all interested in - say - a probability going from 60% to 90%.

by troad

5/16/2026 at 5:08:16 AM

You know what... just down below there's a comment saying Nate Silver was always wrong, just like meteorologists...

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

by yongjik

5/15/2026 at 9:37:33 PM

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)

by shipman05

5/15/2026 at 10:05:25 PM

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.

by bombcar

5/15/2026 at 11:46:05 PM

> even though clearly he was wrong.

Once again, a failure to understand probabilities.

"They gave heads a 50% chance and it came up tails. They're claiming success for giving heads more of a chance than anyone else but they were still wrong". 65-35 probability is squarely in the neighborhood of a literal coin toss.

by triceratops

5/15/2026 at 10:29:35 PM

I remember vaguely the opposite. They were the only major prediction site that thought Trump had any significant chance of winning.

by yesb

5/16/2026 at 5:00:44 AM

Some ignorant people need to play X-Com. A 95% chance to hit a target does not mean you hit the target 100% of the time. For fucks sake, even D&D players understand the concept of a critical miss.

by tstrimple

5/15/2026 at 7:35:10 PM

This makes no sense. Sure, he got nearly every prediction wrong but so have their meteorologists. Why just pick on poor ol' Nate?

by sparrish

5/15/2026 at 7:54:49 PM

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....

by MostlyStable

5/15/2026 at 7:39:33 PM

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.

by cmsparks

5/15/2026 at 7:50:27 PM

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.

by fabian2k

5/15/2026 at 7:53:40 PM

People consistently have a hard time understanding that 30% probabilities happen all the time.

by softwaredoug

5/15/2026 at 8:06:11 PM

Surely not all the time.

by triceratops

5/15/2026 at 9:36:23 PM

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.

by BobaFloutist

5/15/2026 at 11:49:01 PM

I was making a joke but yes that's a good point.

by triceratops

5/15/2026 at 10:01:38 PM

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.

by AnimalMuppet

5/15/2026 at 8:43:16 PM

30% of the time it is all of the time.

by Lerc

5/15/2026 at 8:04:02 PM

Some say 30% of the time.

by Yossarrian22

5/15/2026 at 8:21:55 PM

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.

by krapp

5/15/2026 at 8:22:50 PM

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.

by add-sub-mul-div

5/15/2026 at 9:04:38 PM

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.

by bigfishrunning

5/16/2026 at 12:46:15 AM

538 was sold in 2018 with Trump's first term ending early 2021.

by lesuorac

5/15/2026 at 7:41:49 PM

This isn't about Nate's articles (although perhaps those are gone as well).

by BeetleB

5/15/2026 at 9:53:35 PM

Did he predict odds? How are you so sure his odds were wrong?

by darkarmani

5/15/2026 at 11:04:11 PM

He doesn’t have the faintest idea how to turn the keys.

by nozzlegear

5/15/2026 at 7:53:10 PM

[dead]

by redsocksfan45