If you cared so much about it, why did you sell it?
Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
261–270 of 270 posts
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#262Am 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.
I wouldn't say unprofessional, because this isn't a normal employer-employee relationship. Nate Silver is a famous professional, he made a business deal with a large media corporation, he made some money; later that large media corporation used the IP he sold them in arguably-bad ways, and he's upset. I don't blame him for being upset, certainly I don't think he owes Disney anything, but at the same time he's the one…
You hit the nail on the head with your last sentence -- he agreed to sell to a big corp, and this is the kind of thing big corps do. I get that it's unfortunate, but this is the kind of thing you have to anticipate when you sell a business.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Sore losers don’t generally write at length about their own mistakes and poor decisions that led to the ultimate demise of their baby.
Sore losers absolutely complain. It's one of the biggest traits of being a sore loser.
A mature person would be disappointed, vent to their close friends/spouse, and then shut up about it. They wouldn't publish a long blog post to air their grievances.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
they do since Substack was invented because it turns out a digital rehabilitation facility for whiny and overly wordy sore losers is a fantastic subscription business. Might want to think about selling that one to Disney as well and then writing about your great regrets of selling your substack on substack v2 in ten years, that's gotta be amazing content for another ten posts
What are your criteria for recognizing a useful insightful blog into a poster's previous business ventures? Few tellers are neutral and objective, many writers get accused of selectively editing things: Philip Greenspun's account of the demise of Ars Digita springs to mind. Or Jerry Kaplan on Go (mobile startup). Or Joel Spolsky on the last decade of StackOverflow.
Maybe it's just a stylistic choice, but if this happened to me, I wouldn't write a long post about it. I'd tweet, "They deleted the archive; what a sad end to this chapter of my life" (or something like that to let the world know what happened & that I was disappointed), but I wouldn't write a long rant. Maybe a short blog post, maybe.
I don't view his post as useful or insightful, but instead view it as demonstrating a lack of understanding of normal business practices. It's like he didn't anticipate that this could happen, whereas it's always a risk when you sell out. The exact same thing has happened to lots of other small blog/media outlets, like Kara Swisher's Re/code. This isn't an unexpected situation, but he's acting like it is. And that simply demonstrates a lack of maturity.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but he's failing to see the big picture. Selling any small company to any big company leads to this risk. To hold water, his argument should be: "we shouldn't have sold the business at all," not "we shouldn't have sold to ESPN." I personally don't love ESPN/Disney/ABC, but basically all major corporations that make acquisitions do this. Google does it all the time. It's very clearly a known risk when you sell a…
It wouldn't have been a business to begin with if he didn't sell it. At the time, it was just a blog driving a modest amount of ad revenue. Partnering with bigger outfits allowed him to hire staff and cover more ground, something that he could never do without outside investment. He has since returned to blogging, which to my understanding drives enough revenue for himself and exactly one assistant. I replied to your…
I guess I read the tone of his blog post a little differently than you did. I basically interpreted it as boiling down to "disney sucks" and while he did admit to making some mistakes, IMO he didn't take nearly enough personal responsibility for the situation ending up with what we have today. I can empathize because it obviously is a disappointing result, but I interpreted the blog post as basically a complaint against his ex-employer (a "how could they have done this!" type of thing), not as a mature reflection that recognizes that he himself effectively caused this result. If he had said, "I shouldn't have been a sellout to ANY big corp," I'd feel differently.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess I feel like Nate should have anticipated this situation. By choosing to sell his company to a big conglomerate, this is the type of risk he opened himself up to. ABC/Disney certainly isn't blameless here, but this is the risk that any smaller company takes on when they get acquired. (The exact same thing happens to the startups that Google buys and then sunsets 12 months later.)
Big companies love to shut things down. Being so petty about something they don't actually want is less common and deserves loud mockery.
Eh, maybe. I feel like once you're a sellout, the situation is out of your hands. As a founder, you have to accept that, or you shouldn't sell the business in the first place. Or you could structure some very strict buyout terms, I suppose.
Companies pay obscene amounts of money all the time for things don't end up using. Google does it all the time. Was Disney acting a fool here? Absolutely. But is it within their rights to do so? Also yes. (I'm actually kinda surprised they didn't sunset it sooner, since I don't think it was making much money.)
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I think the presidential election system may be the one to blame. Only two parties, both very much "to the right", doesn't feel like a sane system anymore. IMO the better way is to have the government represent the people, and representing the people generally means enough politicians and having to go for a consensus.
Somehow "centrist" has taken on a negative connotation in Democratic circles, but I don't understand it. Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation. Governing in a sustainable way usually means big tent politics with give and take on the small stuff. Bill Clinton epitomized that style.
> Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation.
Are you talking about US politics here? I don't see anything that would get close to "left", so "far left"... unless they reach the far left by going enough to the right I guess?
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somehow "centrist" has taken on a negative connotation in Democratic circles, but I don't understand it. Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation. Governing in a sustainable way usually means big tent politics with give and take on the small stuff. Bill Clinton epitomized that style.
> Far left politics are wrecker politics that have their moments and then (hopefully) get sent back to the political desert for a generation. Are you talking about US politics here? I don't see anything that would get close to "left", so "far left"... unless they reach the far left by going enough to the right I guess?
1619 project is Jacobin-style, revisionist history politics. Defund the Police, Jacobin. To flood drugs, homeless and immigrants into sanctuary cities is intentional Jacobin tactics to cause normal people to become fed up and to overturn the system. Revolutionaries are gonna revolt. Too bad everyone is too tired and distracted to give a crap about their utopian visions.
In rare and extreme circumstances it makes sense to have a revolution because the people are oppressed. For the rest of history, revolutionary fervor always comes from power hungry psychopaths who'd jail and kill everyone that stands in their way and then rule perpetually over everyone that's left if they could.
Thankfully, their time is usually short. They had a good run this time, very sneaky and devilish, but back to the political desert they go.
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#269At 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.
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...
Re: Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
#270At 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.
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 th…
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