'So Much Hard Work Erased': Nate Silver Vents Disney Told Him to 'Get Lost' Before Deleting FiveThirtyEight's Archive

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: MEDIAite

May 19th, 2026, 4:36 pm


Nate Silver eulogized his old website FiveThirtyEight in a lengthy blog post on Tuesday and lamented there was “so much hard work erased” when Disney recently decided to wipe the political data outlet’s entire archive. How much hard work? Silver calculated 200,000 hours, or about 23 years of combined work.

“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,” Silver explained. “Do the math, and that works out to about 200,000 person-hours of work that ABC News just deleted.”

That was part of Silver’s massive 4,900-word breakdown of the website’s complicated history on his Silver Bulletin Substack account. Silver went through the website’s history and outlined both his beefs with Disney and ABC, as well as some mistakes he said he made as well. He also expanded on Disney’s decision to erase FiveThirtyEight’s entire web history, which Silver said last week was a move made by a “bunch of a**holes.”

Before deleting the site’s history, Silver said he approached Disney “a year or two ago” about buying the archive. “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,” Silver explained. That plan was shot down, though. “We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight,” Silver explained.

Read more: https://www.mediaite.com/media/so-much-hard-work-erased-nate-silver-vents-disney-told-him-to-get-lost-before-deleting-fivethirtyeights-archive/

[BidenRocks]

1. Nothing completely disappears.

That's what we were led to believe.
An obscure locker in a Missouri salt mine storage facility.
Maybe close to old Hollywood movies.
Back up tapes.

[Polybius]

2. I hate when companies do that

There was an article on 538 that I liked to go back to from time to time, from the week before the 2016 election. Now it's gone, unless someone archived it.

[BumRushDaShow]

3. Wayback Machine might have snaphots

Example (I keep a text file with various links) and here is one that I included in this 2022 post - https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=18922732

ABC link now purged - https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-predictions-i-got-wrong/

Snapshot of that on Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20260414195652/https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/2022-predictions-i-got-wrong/

ETA - there was an article by 538 writers that I have a link to that is still live - https://abcnews.com/538/biden-reshaped-judiciary/story?id=117717279

[QueerDuck]

4. Maybe he ought to have been archiving it himself... if it actually meant so much to him.

I think, and I'm just guessing, that the "snub" hurts his pride worse than any actual emotional loss of the data itself being unceremoniously discarded and deleted.

[displacedvermoter]

5. He wanted to make some money on it, that is the "snub" he is hurting over...

[fujiyamasan]

6. The data likely didn't belong to him

Archiving it outside Disney’s servers would have opened himself to legal liabilities.

[reACTIONary]

12. Not for personal use...

.... that would be fair use under copyright, and, in fact, no one would really know. If he intended to sell or "reporspurpse" the data it would lead to legal problems.

[fujiyamasan]

7. Would anyone actually expect Disney to not do this?

I have no idea what the arrangement was over the ownership of the data, but Silver probably should have better negotiated archival rights up front.

Large corporations frequently purge data. In some cases it’s due to GPDR (likely not the case here), but there are policies in place.

Besides you’re dealing with Disney, whose executives are well… typically corporate ass holes. Once their relationship with Silver was over, they likely said fuck off and had interest in selling him anything either, if it meant giving him any potential edge.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. Before he went ABC, his 538 blog run was running on the NYT starting in 2010

His first entry there -

FiveThirtyEight
Nate Silver’s Political Calculus

Welcome (and Welcome Back) to FiveThirtyEight


By Nate Silver August 25, 2010 11:25 am


FiveThirtyEight.com premiered on March 7, 2008, three days after Hillary Rodham Clinton won the Democratic presidential primaries in Texas and Ohio — victories that were widely described as giving her momentum in her race for the Democratic nomination. Mrs. Clinton was already well ahead in the polls in the next big primary contest, in Pennsylvania.

From reading news reports or watching the nightly gantlet of cable news programs, the message seemed to be that there would be a close fight between Mrs. Clinton and Barack Obama through the final contests in June (and perhaps to the Democratic National Convention in August) — with each candidate about equally likely to prevail.

To those of us who had been following the numbers, however, the outcome was hardly so uncertain. Presidential nominations are not determined on the basis of momentum; they are determined on the basis of delegates, and Mr. Obama had a significant advantage there — thanks to a long string of victories in midsize states throughout February, and huge margins in some smaller states on Super Tuesday that gave him a lead of about 150 pledged delegates. Even if Mrs. Clinton had achieved a 25-point victory in Pennsylvania, she would still have trailed by more than 100 delegates, and it would have been all but impossible for her to catch up with few large states left to vote.

Things went rather badly for Mr. Obama from that point in the campaign on: the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. controversy surfaced just a few days after Mrs. Clinton’s wins in Texas and Ohio, and Mr. Obama was feeling critics’ heat after he suggested that small-town voters had been “clinging” to guns and religion. He lost the Pennsylvania primary by 9 points, and managed barely more than a quarter of the vote in some other late-voting states like West Virginia and Kentucky. Yet he won the nomination easily. There would be no floor flight in Denver. The math trumped the momentum.

(snip)

He was there from 2010 - 2013 and it looks like that archive is still intact. Then he left for ESPN (which had become ABC property under Raygun in,1984) -

Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight Blog Is to Join ESPN Staff


By Brian Stelter

July 19, 2013

Nate Silver, the statistician who attained national fame for his accurate projections about the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, is parting ways with The New York Times and moving his FiveThirtyEight franchise to ESPN, the sports empire controlled by the Walt Disney Company, according to ESPN employees with direct knowledge of his plans.

At ESPN, Mr. Silver is expected to have a wide-ranging portfolio. Along with his writing and number-crunching, he will most likely be a regular contributor to “Olbermann,” the late-night ESPN2 talk show hosted by Keith Olbermann that will have its debut at the end of August. In political years, he will also have a role at ABC News, which is owned by Disney.

An ESPN spokeswoman declined to comment on Friday night. Mr. Silver declined to comment. The employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Mr. Silver’s deal could be announced as soon as Monday. Before creating statistical models for elections, Mr. Silver was a baseball sabermetrician who built a highly effective system for projecting how players would perform in the future. For a time he was a managing partner of Baseball Prospectus.

At public events recently, he has expressed interest in covering sports more frequently, so the ESPN deal is a logical next step. Mr. Silver’s three-year contract with The Times is set to expire in late August and his departure will most likely be interpreted as a blow to the company, which has promoted Mr. Silver and his brand of poll-based projections.

(snip)

[highplainsdem]

9. I'm much more concerned about what might happen to Colbert's archived shows and YouTube channel.

[Martin68]

10. Why didn't Silver back it all up?

[Deminpenn]

11. 538 turned out to be GIGO

No one is going to miss the archived data. Now Nate Silver can go back to fantasy baseball from which he came.