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> 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

But why?

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

ABC has opted to step on Thucydides Trap.

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.

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