Nate Silver details how Disney deleted ~200,000 person-hours of FiveThirtyEight content, redirecting the archive to ABC News with no public explanation.
Key Takeaways
ABC News silently redirected fivethirtyeight.com to its homepage; Silver discovered this while researching his 2014 SPI soccer model article.
Silver estimates ~20 stories/week over 10 years at ~20 hours each equals roughly 200,000 person-hours of work now gone.
Disney never attempted a paywall or profit model; Silver and senior staff begged for one and were told it wasn’t worth Disney’s bandwidth.
Silver believes FiveThirtyEight could have reached 100,000+ paying subscribers, comparable to The Free Press, which recently sold for $150 million.
Link rot is systemic: a Pew/Common Crawl study found ~40% of links dead after 10 years; ahrefs found two-thirds attrition after 11 years.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters highlighted leadership-transition risk as underappreciated in B2B and acquisition contexts: new management routinely kills successful predecessor projects regardless of performance.
Discussion split on Silver’s credibility loss: some blamed 2016 election coverage framing, others defended the 30% Trump-win probability as statistically sound given how far conventional models were off.
Broader consensus: Disney’s deletion reflects a decision-maker whose mental model simply doesn’t register destroying a decade of public-interest content as harmful, not malice but indifference.
Notable Comments
@simonw: “I always wonder if there’s a decision maker… for whom the idea of deleting a decade+ of content doesn’t strike them as bad in the slightest.”
@legitster: Points out Silver’s framing is sharp: Disney spent money on 538 but never actually invested in making it viable, treating it like an unused gym membership.
