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.
> 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.
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.
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.
EVERYONE missed on the Trump-1 election. Even Trump (IMO) didn't expect to win; he was copying another bad candidate's example of cashing out on a book deal.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
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[ 0.15 ms ] story [ 72.5 ms ] threadAll 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.
Edit: nm it was definitely the burrito battle royale bracket. Big burrito couldn’t handle the truth being revealed about their restaurants.
--Nate Silver (538 founder)
ABC seem pretty petty here.
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.
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.
It feels a lot like the 538 one, with lots of familiar contributors. The latest ep is a live show with Nate & Clare, might be to your taste.
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.
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.
Guess we better back up their GitHub repos before that gets taken down as well
https://github.com/fivethirtyeight
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.
<https://web.archive.org/web/20250305183642/https://projects....>
NB: one of my gripes about current / contemporary content management / publishing systems is that almost all of them make it really hard to find either a specific article or a particular day's version of a site.
NB2: I realise writing the above that HN is an exceptionally welcome exception to that rule, with its "past" link (<https://news.ycombinator.com/front>), which not only exists but is prominently placed (top bar, 3rd link of 8 content-based links) on the site.
I wouldn't touch that with a ten foot poll.
Sometimes companies acquire upcoming competitors specifically to shut them down so that existing cash cow product lines can continue.