FiveThirtyEight scrubbed from the internet

Disney shutdown FiveThirtyEight last year, but the archive stayed online. Well, they got rid of that too. All old FiveThirtyEight links forward to ABC News. Nate Silver goes into detail about the shutdown and mismanagement of the site and brand.

It would be nice if that work could be preserved for the public record. I don’t know what plans Disney has for FiveThirtyEight, if any. But I did approach Disney a year or two ago, through my agent, about acquiring the remaining IP. I’m probably the logical high bidder, though the value is rapidly depreciating as what’s left of the site falls into disrepair. At a minimum, we’d restore the archive, with prominent links to Silver Bulletin.

We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight. It apparently wasn’t a long conversation, so I don’t have a lot more color to report than that.

Hanlon’s Razor states: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But honestly, I don’t know which explanation is better suited to ABC. During the second half of my tenure with Disney, it felt like they were putting almost literally zero effort into any decisions involving FiveThirtyEight (other than my being featured prominently in their election night coverage).

In its heyday, FiveThirtyEight was a boon for statisticians and data folks. Normal people saw how data analysis could be applied to everyday thinking. It’s too bad Disney and ABC News could never figure it out.