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Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

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Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#11

Post by jandrese »

dionian wrote: post #2

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 ove…

> leftward trend of the mainstream press

Oh yeah, venerable institutions like the Washington Post, New York Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and the like? Or maybe you mean the TV news organizations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, Nexstar, or Hearst? Or maybe cable news organizations like CNN or Fox News?

The narrative of the "liberal media" is so out of date it makes you look out of touch. The mainstream media is captured by billionaire interests and has been so for years now.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#12

Post by divbzero »

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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#13

Post by chao- »

>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.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#14

Post by toomuchtodo »

ilamont wrote: post #4

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. "R…

https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/introducing-vanishing-cu...

https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026

(when able, please consider donating to the Internet Archive; they are the durable, long term storage system of last resort)

> Yes, you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin. The election models and polling averages are here, and new-and-improved versions of the sports models (PELE, ELWAY, COOPER) are gradually returning too.2 Galen Druke, Clare Malone and I have even been getting the old podcast crew back together for live shows.

With regards to:

> 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.

May I suggest:

https://help.archive.org/help/uploading-a-basic-guide/

You can upload them all as a single item, or as individual items per piece and asking IA Patron Services to create a collection for you.

> My personal blogs are still up, but even those will die at some point.

Drop links, and they will be queued for crawling, if not already archived. If you would like to self serve, https://web.archive.org/save

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#15

Post by CGMthrowaway »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #6
dionian wrote: post #2

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 ove…

> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press. What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.

>cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward

As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#16

Post by duskwuff »

ilamont wrote: post #4

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. "R…

> "Random sample of Internet links" is going to include a lot of absolute garbage.

It's also likely to include a lot of non-content links, e.g. links to index and navigation pages, interstitials, search results, user profiles, image galleries, etc. These sorts of links don't reliably address specific content, and it's natural that they'll change or die over time. This doesn't necessarily mean that anything valuable has been lost.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#17

Post by superfrank »

SilverElfin wrote: post #10

It’s what happened to Star Wars. Figures.

How so? To me it seems like the exact opposite of what's happened with Star Wars in the last 20 years.

538 was purchased and then left to wither and die where as Disney seems intent on squeezing every last penny from the Star Wars franchise by using the IP as much as possible

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#18

Post by burnte »

dionian wrote: post #2

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 ove…

> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press.

What? Media in the USA has staggered to the right over the past ten years. The only reason it was called liberal before that was because one party used facts and data and the other preferred to rig the system against the common people. While Stephen Colbert made the joke "Reality has a well known liberal bias" it's joke only in that the conservative viewpoint today seems focused on imaginary problems and denying the existence of real ones.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#19

Post by rc_kas »

CGMthrowaway wrote: post #15
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe this has to do with the leftward trend of the mainstream press. What mainstream press outlet has moved leftwards? I can't think of any, and I certainly am interested in knowing which those might be. Inversely, cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward in the last 10 years.

>cbs, the ny times, and the washington post have all shifted rather noticeably rightward As the Overton window or activist left moves further left on issues like identity politics, crime and free speech (1619 Project era at NYT, staff revolts etc), steady coverage can appear "righter" by comparison without actually changing

Remember when Net Nuetrality was the priority of hackernews and slashdot and basically all people in tech. Now it's a "leftist policy". We live in crazy times.

Overton window has definitely shifted to the right. Beign a normal person who values science is now considered "leftist". Its nuts.

Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight

#20

Post by nashashmi »

> 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.

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