Comment by internet2000

14 hours ago

I'm seeing a lot about this. What makes this situation different than any other website going offline?

7 comments

internet2000

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patcon  14 hours ago

I think it's the fivethirtyeight of of historical significance, and Disney is one of the largest and wealthiest companies on the planet. So it's just kinda like "whoa, this is stratospheric negligence" or "whoa, what is the reason for this... assuming they are not idiots?"

  • materielle  12 hours ago

    Also, they don’t any plans for the IP, and Nate would’ve paid above-market rate just to take over and preserve the content for posterity. He estimates that they deleted 200,000 hours of human labor.

    This is just some Disney suits being extraordinarily petty.

    • dreijs  7 hours ago

      Yes, just to add to this: in the article by Nate [0] he says that he tried to buy the IP but Disney refused because they were unhappy with some of his prior comments.

      "I did approach Disney a year or two ago, through my agent, about acquiring the remaining IP. ...

      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."

      [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48197703

      1 reply →

f311a  10 hours ago

https://www.natesilver.net/p/disney-erased-fivethirtyeight

        Here are some numbers roughly in the right ballpark: during the Disney era, which lasted about 10 years, FiveThirtyEight published about 20 stories a week. Let’s say that each story took about 20 hours to produce between research, writing, graphics and editing.3 Do the math, and that works out to about 200,000 person-hours of work that ABC News just deleted.

mold_aid  7 hours ago

In a sense, nothing - and any other website should be archived, too.

In another sense, it's a journalistic source with information and commentary on past elections. Even aside from the political context that muddies the waters around or outright denies results, matters of public discourse on the web should not be ephemeral or subject to the decisions of the publication - they should be archived.