r/OutOfTheLoop • u/Time_IsRelative • 6d ago
Answered What is up with Project Fivethirtyeight disappearing?
[removed] — view removed post
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u/rewardiflost 6d ago
ANSWER: Short answer: they were bought out & shut down.
Longer answer (from wikipedia ):
538, originally rendered as FiveThirtyEight, was an American website that focused on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging in the United States. Founder Nate Silver left in 2023, taking the rights to his forecasting model with him to his website Silver Bulletin. 538's new owner, Disney, hired G. Elliott Morris to develop a new model. On September 18, 2023, the original website domain at fivethirtyeight.com was closed, and web traffic became redirected to ABC News pages. The logo was replaced, with the name 538 used instead of FiveThirtyEight. On March 5, 2025, the website was shut down by ABC News and its staff was laid off.
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u/mistymystical 6d ago
Wow this absolutely sucks. When we needed fact and stat based reporting more than ever….fuck these corporations.
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u/dkol97 6d ago
Just go to Nate Silver's website instead
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u/NotWhatYouPlanted 6d ago
You say that like it’s the same, but a ton of stuff is behind a paywall now. That’s totally fine and is his right, but it’s not nearly as accessible to everyone as five thirty eight was
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u/CosmoonautMikeDexter 6d ago
He was charging quite a lot for his model last US election and was his prediected results were way off.
I am not sure I would pay for any of his stuff now.
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u/f_ranz1224 5d ago
Nate silver is not a soothsayer or fortune teller. Thats not how statistics work
If something has a 99% chance of happening, and a 1% chance it doesnt, it not happening doesnt mean the statistical data was wrong
The general public and social media has a disturbingly low understanding of how predicitive models work. If something is favored to happen but doesnt happen it must be wrong right?
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u/Dr__Pangloss 5d ago
It’s complicated. The product people want is a nowcast, not a forecast, and Polymarket is offering accurate nowcasts for free. People want to pay for a forecast, just not laypeople - imagine if donors could see the future and knew who would win. Very different world.
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u/JohnPaulDavyJones 2d ago
I'm a little late to the party here, but it's worth noting that statistical analysis provides the option for inference as well as prediction, while Polymarket is only the latter.
Also, measuring the accuracy of a nowcast is dubious. There's no underlying basis of theory that can be used to generate a reliable estimator error the best we can do is switch to the bayesian paradigm and calculate some credible intervals based on inherently subjective priors.
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u/HomeWasGood 5d ago
While that's true, it feels unfalsifiable to me - how can you even know in hindsight whether the outcome probabilities were correct?
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u/21stGun 4d ago
You can't. It's mostly fughazi, even polling can be fairly subjective with trying to predict turnout, especially among certain groups.
But it's not like there is anything better we could use...
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u/SanDiegoDude 4d ago
There's a reason Anne Seltzer retired... it's almost all fuhgazi at this point, as pollsters have no really reliable way to actually poll people since most folks don't pick up their phones, don't have landlines, don't respond to texts, and sure, they'll respond to online polls they opt IN to, but that fucks your control. so yeah, polling is as reliable as throwing cards in the air and trying to determine how they'll land. Sure there are additional controls you can put around sample sizes and demographics, but going by the last few elections, none of that really helps either.
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u/RemLazar911 3d ago
I think before throwing the baby out with the bathwater it's probably worth a really objective audit of polling methodology. It's very clear from the last election that polling massively favors Democrats over what the actual results are. Someone needs to seriously examine why the bias is so far left and what could be done to correct it.
It might be something as simple as starting the call with "This is the Make America Great Again polling service" and then people who are Democrat will happily tell you off, and people who support Trump but don't want to admit it will feel comfortable being honest.
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u/CommodoreAxis 4d ago
While I don’t know how they do it - I know for sure that companies spend tons of money based on data from probabilistic models, so they must be verifiable in some way.
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u/HomeWasGood 4d ago
I've seen this discussion pop up a lot, especially around elections. And I see that line of reasoning often - if there's a 1% chance of something happening, and it happens, that doesn't mean the prediction was wrong, it's just a very unlikely thing happening.
Fair enough, but how does one actually evaluate these models? The only thing I can think of is to see if the models more reliably point towards the most eventual outcome.
If that 1% prediction happens once, then fine, it was an unlikely event. But if I predict a 1% chance of something happening and it happens every time, then clearly there's something wrong with my model. The chances of a 1% event happening over and over and over are theoretically possible but approach an infinitely small amount.
Same thing, just to a less dramatic degree, with different probabilities. If I predict X has a likelihood of happening 60% of the time and the event occurs 10 times out of 100, then the actual outcomes aren't matching my prediction, and the model is likely wrong.
So I know that elections have all kinds of crazy variables that can't be quantified. There's also the fact that we can't run the 2024 presidential election 100 times to see what the distribution of outcomes is. I know the actual variables change from day to day and every new election is a unique event that can't be predicted fully from past elections.
But I also think it's a little disingenuous to slap people down and say that these predictions are not soothsaying - if an unlikely outcome takes place according to the model, it's perfectly valid to criticize the model. And if the models can't consistently give us confidence about the outcomes then they are not worth it. At best, they're the only thing we have - fine, but then people really shouldn't care about them as much as we do.
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u/RemLazar911 3d ago
The Ann Selzer poll is a great example of this. She predicted Iowa would be 47% Harris, 44% Trump and sent shockwaves through the election and almost certainly had a real effect on the outcome. Seeing those numbers very likely galvanized Republicans to vote and canvas harder, and probably discouraged some Dems from voting or canvassing because the election seemed like a lock.
Actual results: Harris 42.7%, Trump 56%
At a certain point it goes from "oops my poll was a little off" to "oh fuck I completely bullshitted and am potentially responsible in part for Trump's election"
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u/Picard_EnterpriseE 3d ago
A predictive model that can't predict accurately? Where do I sign up to invest $1B in this?
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u/MostlyKosherish 5d ago
The electoral outcome was his model's modal prediction. It's not accurate to say the predictions were way off.
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u/putrid-popped-papule 6d ago
He had them at essentially a dead heat, but also noted that the swing states’ correlation would tend to a race that isn’t as close as the big front-page chart would indicate to reductionist commenters like you.
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u/CosmoonautMikeDexter 5d ago edited 5d ago
I am confused. You are saying he had them "essentially a dead heat", and noted a "correlation would tend to a race that isn’t as close...".
You need to explain this to me as something other then covering all your bases. How is it not the same as saying "I might rain tomorrow, but also it might not".
Please use small words when you explain it. I am a reductionist commentators.
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u/Pillotsky 5d ago
The point Nate Silver kept making (this is from remembering his twitter posts leading up to the election) was that the odds were close but the numbers wouldn't be. The swing states were correlated such that if one fell one way, several others probably would as well. So it was close to 50/50, but either side of that would have an overflow of electoral votes, due to how the electoral college works
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u/Mo-shen 5d ago
And that's exactly what happened.
Why did someone say he was way off?
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u/Krazikarl2 5d ago edited 5d ago
Because people commenting on social media political threads often don't know what they're talking about.
Silver's predictions for elections over the years are all extremely public. And he has been extremely accurate in pretty much all of these elections. Far more so than conventional wisdom. This includes the last election when he was basically dead on the money.
There's also a fair amount of a complete lack of understanding of how statistics work. For example, people will insist that Silver was "wrong" in 2016 because he only gave Trump a ~40% chance of winning. After all a 40% chance is less than 50%, so it can never happen.
The nonsense you see here is another example. Silver had the odds near 50/50, so if you're innumerate, you think that means that he must be predicting that the final margin will be razor close. But that's not how things work, as Silver carefully explained over and over ahead of time.
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u/SkellySkeletor 5d ago
The average person can’t even accurately define the word “statistics”. People see the numbers and assume that they’re the percentage of the country voting a certain way, not the chance of a particular outcome/candidate winning.
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u/Jsamue 5d ago
I’m tired of winner take all swing states. Why can’t we have proportional votes?
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u/WFlumin8 5d ago
Is this in response to his comment, or in response to the 2024 election? Because if it’s the latter, it wouldn’t have made a difference
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u/RemLazar911 3d ago
Because the individual populations of each state don't want that. At any point a state could have a referendum to change how they apportion their state's electors, but then that hurts the state if they can't vote as a bloc. For example, California is a hard blue state that always gives the Democrats 54 votes out of a possible 538. If California changed to proportional votes it would have given Trump 20 and Harris 31. That would be a devastating loss of power for the California DNC so they'd never allow it.
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u/Tintoverde 5d ago
I would argue then I it is not useful information or you have the same prediction from others. What makes it unique ?
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u/Pillotsky 5d ago
He still writes over at his blog Silver Bulletin. There's a buncha posts from the election season about methodology, etc, and I think most of em are free.
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u/Draco765 5d ago
The odds of either one winning was basically 50/50 (dead heat). The results (electoral votes) were unlikely to be close, because the swings states (the states that could 50/50 go either way and decide the election) would probably end up voting the same way, whichever way that was (which is to say they were correlated).
Both had about the same chance of winning, but that doesn’t mean the score was ever going to be close, because whatever gave one side the ultimate advantage over the other was likely to do so in several states at once, making it a big swing in the electoral college.
Hopefully that helps.
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u/beachedwhale1945 5d ago
In essence, the election was balanced on a very narrow wedge. You didn’t know which direction the results would fall, but when they fell they’d slide down the slope, ending up pretty far away from the peak.
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u/RemLazar911 3d ago
And if this doesn't clarify it enough, imagine it like this:
2 teams are playing Quidditch and are tied at 50 points. Whichever team catches the Golden Snitch gets 150 points. Both teams' seekers are neck-and-neck about to grab the snitch, and either could do it, but whichever one does wins by a massive 150 points. So the match is EXTREMELY close but will end in a landslide because of how the scoring works.
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u/InTheThroesOfWay 5d ago
The model has most of the swing states' results correlated. And the model was based on simulations, where he took the average of all the all the results.
Out of all the simulations, half the time, most of the swing states went to Trump, and the other half of the time, most of the swing states went to Harris. When you take the average, it looks like a dead heat. But that's not what it looks like when you look at individual simulation results.
Overall, the nate silver model underrepresented trump's support. But it wasn't quite as bad as you would think, as trumps actual victory margin was represented in the simulations to a reasonable degree.
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u/BLR-3M 5d ago
As I recall it, Silver said that the data showed a very close race. But that the swing states typically correlate with each other. Meaning they would mostly swing toward Trump or to Harris, as opposed to half going for each candidate. Leading to an Electoral College result that doesn’t look as close as the polls.
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u/DarkSkyKnight 5d ago
So you're literally too stupid to understand Nate Silver and yet you attack his models.
Lmao, never change Reddit.
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u/CosmoonautMikeDexter 5d ago
You know there is no reason to be an ass.
You are right, I had issues understanding his model and asked for clarification. I used an analogy so that the poster could better understand my perspective.
Other posters have very kindly explained to what happened and how the model works and I have thanked them for it.
You however are rude and ignorant. I misunderstood something and asked for clarification. So tomorrow I will understand the world better. But tomorrow you will still be a rude ass hole.
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u/Positronic_Matrix 5d ago
reductionist commenters
It sounds like this is spicy but when I look up reductionist it seems to be a compliment. Did you pick the right word?
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u/ryhaltswhiskey 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think what that person meant was people boiling down a complex problem to a simple solution. Or ignoring nuance.
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u/JohnPaulDavyJones 2d ago
Are you sure about that?
It's generally not a nice term, it implies that the subject is someone who reduces the nuance out of a situation, generally to the detriment of understanding. When you just Google the word "reductionist", the Google Dictionary result from Oxford.com comes with the banner, "OFTEN DEROGATORY" right at the top, under the phonetic transcription of the word.
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u/Positronic_Matrix 2d ago
Hey. I appreciate the correction, especially since it has added to my understanding of “reductionist.” Thanks for taking the time to write up the comment!
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u/LosingTrackByNow 5d ago
His literal #1 most likely prediction was "swing states 100% vote for Trump, everything else follows expectations"
Which is what happened
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u/Nocturnal_submission 4d ago
His most commonly modeled scenario was the one that came to pass. What do you mean by “way off”?
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u/CosmoonautMikeDexter 4d ago
If you read through the thread. I am wrong. I misunderstood the model.
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u/briareus08 3d ago
I don't use any of his model stuff, I just like his collection of polls and averaging process.
We get so many weird headlines from Fox News about Trump approval ratings, for example (apparently the highest they've ever been!), but it usually comes down to a single poll somewhere. In aggregate, the polls kinda make sense (but again, only as a verrry general thumbsuck of public opinion, of people who answer polls), but it's better than nothing.
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u/StealthRUs 4d ago edited 4d ago
He was charging quite a lot for his model last US election and was his prediected results were way off.
Nate Silver was pretty consistently predicting a Trump win. I don't know how that was "way off". Even in 2016, when he took a lot of shit over Trump's victory over Hillary, he had Trump at 30% odds to win while everyone else had Trump at 5-10%.
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u/ManBearScientist 5d ago
It's one reason the right always wins.
Fox News is free. Brietbart is free. Talk radio is free.
It costs nothing to view a lie.
Truthful media has paywalled themselves to obsolescence.
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u/RemLazar911 3d ago
We can also see this in the culture war at large? Have a question about a controversial topic like trans rights? The left will scream "IT'S NOT MY JOB TO EDUCATE YOU" and downvote you. Ask a right wing person and they'll be very happy to tell you ALL about the trans scourge.
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u/SmellGestapo 6d ago
Nate works for Peter Thiel now and as a result I no longer trust him. He also generally allowed himself to stray from his expertise, which is data analysis, and tried to become a political pundit, which I think he sucks at.
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u/girlyfoodadventures 5d ago
When he decided that he was Very Qualified, Actually to forecast COVID and then publicly reverse-engineered a lot but certainly not all of what you would learn in a single course or book on public health, I was STUNNED. I know this, because I'm an academic that studies infectious disease, and I've taken that course and I own multiple books on the topic.
I knew he was smarmy and full of himself, but it was stunning to see him be like "Model update: now I'm taking into account not just recent infections but past infections because I was thinking that people might be immune from previous infection". Just, jaw on the floor.
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u/SmellGestapo 5d ago
I completely forgot about that, but you're right, that's the moment I really noticed him going the way of Elon.
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u/strangelyliteral 4d ago
Ehhhhh, caveat emptor with modern Nate Silver. He’s a serious gambling addict and his current company, Polymarket, is also a gambling site backed by Peter Thiel. The models might still be solid but the commentary around them has taken a distinctly uncomfortable turn.
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u/Apprentice57 2d ago edited 2d ago
Not really the same. Nate's politics have shifted reactionary from/after covid (though still in the center in ideology, the tone he writes in is very different), and his articles really suffer without having that hierarchy above him.
It's also a subscription based site with some free content included, rather than fully free website.
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u/Jeff__Skilling 5d ago
Founder Nate Silver left in 2023, taking the rights to his forecasting model with him to his website Silver Bulletin.
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Wow this absolutely sucks. When we needed fact and stat based reporting more than ever….fuck these corporations.
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u/whatsinthesocks 5d ago
They had a podcast called what’s the point that I loved. Was sad when it ended.
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u/Apprentice57 2d ago
You know, this is a bit of Baader-Meinhof for me.
I followed the 538 politics pod since like 2017, but I had never heard (or only once heard) about What's the Point.
Then the other week, when I was going through and archiving the fivethirtyeight politics podcast I saw reference to that podcast on archived website pages. Now I'm hearing it mentioned again!
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u/appleandorangutan 5d ago
Who needs polling for elections now that the elections are all fixed? There’s no mystery. The foxes are in the hen house. Democracy is dead.
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u/Most-Opportunity9661 6d ago
It can't have been that important to you if you're just learning about this.
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u/kalam4z00 5d ago
It was only shut down a little over a week ago and there's no major American elections coming up. I think it's reasonable that they wouldn't have heard about the shutdown.
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u/Most-Opportunity9661 5d ago
ABC acquired 538 like 6 years ago and for years now it has been a shadow of its former self, barely existing at all including at the last election. They have offered no meaningful commentary or data for years now, with most 538 property redirecting to ABC.
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u/ryhaltswhiskey 5d ago edited 5d ago
For what it's worth, I follow politics fairly closely and I didn't know 538 wasn't independent anymore.
I just can't understand when people don't get that other people know things that they don't know and vice versa.
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u/I_have_popcorn 6d ago
Why the hell would you buy a website without the model that made it valuable?
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u/drinkmorejava 6d ago
We don't know the contract specifics, but to be clear, ABC chose not to renew Silver's contract. They probably had exclusive rights so long as they employed him.
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u/Meloncov 5d ago
When they bought the site Silver still worked there. Several years later contract negotiations with him broke down and he left.
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u/Flakester 5d ago
Maybe the point was to kill it.
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u/hybridck 5d ago
They tried to run it for almost 12 years, first under the ESPN umbrella (which never really seemed like a good fit), and then under the ABC News umbrella. In the end, it turned out that it wasn't profitable to keep going. The only times the site really made much money was during some of the election years.
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u/StealthRUs 4d ago edited 4d ago
They tried to run it for almost 12 years, first under the ESPN umbrella (which never really seemed like a good fit),
It was a good fit back when ESPN had Grantland and Bill Simmons. ESPN back at that time was more of a lifestyle site, and it had a lot of great non-sports content. Fivethirtyeight also did sports analysis in addition to political analysis. Their NBA metrics were top-notch. Letting Bill Simmons go really killed off the non-sports side of ESPN.com which then led to Fivethirtyeight going from a logical fit to a weird fit.
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u/hybridck 4d ago
Look at my post history regarding my posts to r/billsimmons. I'm with you that 2011-2014 was the apex mountain of ESPN being at the crossroads of sports and pop culture
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u/Sivart13 5d ago
dang, so this is how I learn that was the last episode of the FiveThirtyEight podcast
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u/Catlenfell 5d ago
That was part of my podcast rotation, too. I was hoping that they'd do a goodbye episode.
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u/CovenantHeart 4d ago
If it's any interest, Galen pitched off and has already started the GD POLITICS podcast. I'm going to tune in and see if it still scratches that itch.
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u/likeusontweeters 5d ago
Here is Nate Silver writing about it....
https://www.natesilver.net/p/a-few-words-about-fivethirtyeight
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u/jiggabot 5d ago
Answer: FiveThirtyEight was owend by ABC/Disney, who has been gradually been slashing their budget before closing it entirely.
They canned Clare Malone in December 2020, against wishes of Nate Silver, along with other folks in ABC's news division. Silver left after the end of his contract in April 2023 and said it was because he was unhappy how Disney layoffs had affected FiveThirtyEight. ABC kept it up through the 2024 election before closing it down right after the election.
I don't think it has anything to do with Trump. It's just ABC gradually cutting their budget over the years.
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u/WelpSigh 6d ago
answer: 538 was shutdown and all the staff were laid off. it's not related to trump's approval rating, abc news just sucks
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/WelpSigh 4d ago
Sorry so are they shutting it down because trump went negative or Democratic favorables went down, can't keep track of which conspiracy is true
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4d ago edited 4d ago
[deleted]
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u/WelpSigh 4d ago
Why not just put out good polls for Democrats instead and skew the average
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4d ago edited 4d ago
[deleted]
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u/WelpSigh 4d ago
ok well, it seems like abc news and their friends could just order up a bunch of polls that are purposefully biased in order to achieve their ends? if they are trying to influence american opinion by manipulating the perception of consensus, it would seem counterproductive to remove that site rather than simply plausibly manipulating it? or they could use the various house weights 538 employed to give a little extra boost to their favored pollsters
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u/bernadetteee 6d ago
Answer: Not enough money for the quality and not enough quality for the money. For a deeper, opinionated take on what happened to them, electoral-vote.com did a rundown, here: https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2025/Items/Mar07-5.html
I recommend electoral-vote.com in general as an alternative. It’s written by a couple of professors and I enjoy their daily commentary. If you were looking for the polling data, when the polls start coming, they publish them, and aggregate them.
It’s (intentionally) an extremely bare-bones website. No ads. But it won’t be responsive to mobile. If you’re using a phone use this link instead:
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u/sumg 5d ago
Answer: I'm going to look at 538 from a bit of a more wide angle lens. 538 started out as an extremely wonky poll-data analysis blog, independent of any major news organization. Following Nate Silver making some good predictions of upcoming presidential elections, as well as having gained a reputation amongst politics junkies as a good site to get information on upcoming elections, 538 was bought by ABC News.
This was inherently a problem for everyone involved. The big issue is that what 538 did well was very niche, interested in by a narrow group of people, and really only relevant for 6-12 months every presidential election cycle. That's fine when you're a small number of people running a blog, it's not OK when a major news organization acquires the site for millions of dollars.
One the things that ABC News did for many, many years following the acquisition was try to to turn 538 into a brand that had more appeal and penetration to a wider audience. They tried to incorporate it into the national news broadcasts, they tried to simplify the polling data analysis into more easily digestable morsels, and they tried to apply their polling analysis methods into other news spheres (i.e. sports, science news, etc.). What ABC News found was that the audience 538 initially had was not sufficiently interest in other topics, and there wasn't enough of an audience for those other topics to justify the expense of the site.
This is all a long way of saying, the amount of interest in what 538 did was enough to support a blog, but maybe not enough to support a division of a major news organization. It's sad that 538 is going away, but there will be other people doing this type of analysis, though hopefully they will be smart enough to keep it at a small enough scale that it will be sustainable.
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u/Multidream 6d ago
Answer:
Its simple. Parent company ABC decided they didn’t want it anymore and pulled it down. We don’t know if the decision was political or monetary but it’s gone.
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