Every writer's worst nightmare.

I used to back up my shit manually as PDF docs. Pretty retarded (but it was the 2010s, and I was broke). Last few years I've forked out for a wonderful service called Authory that just scans my outlets for new stuff, automatically backs them up, and notifies me (plus any mailing list, should I wish to build one) of new content... like a Substack for everything outside Substack, I dunno.

(Probably one of yous AI/open-source bros #1492590 will tell me there's a better, freer, cheaper way to do this for gazillion make-believe tokens, blah-blah. I'm happy to hear the pitch.)

Anyway, Nate Silver had some old stuff deletedAnyway, Nate Silver had some old stuff deleted

Background: Before he turned into the data/politics/sports/election geek he's known for, he built a political prediction model called FiveThirtyEight which outperformed election surveys since, I think, 2008. (He describes it in the piece as "Moneyball, but for elections".) Acquired by Disney, and then after disputes he left and built his own Silver Bulletin + wrote a book (great fucking book! First ~BooksAndArticles post I ever shared on SN #735212) etc, etc.

I founded FiveThirtyEight.com under the pseudonym “poblano” in March 2008 as a spin-off from a popular series of posts at the progressive blog Daily Kos.

Last week all the archive at ABC/Disney/ESPN was just completely gone:

Sometimes weird things happen on the internet late at night, so I resisted the temptation to tweet something about it. But one of my former colleagues noticed the same thing on Friday. ABC News hasn’t made any public comment that I’m aware of — they declined to make a statement to the New York Times, which wrote about FiveThirtyEight’s disappearance. It’s possible that they have something up their sleeve, I suppose. But presumably, this was either intentional or willfully neglectful. All of the former FiveThirtyEight site from my nearly decade-long tenure at ESPN/Disney/ABC is gone

Being big and famous and well-regarded, it's not all over for that great, past content ("200,000 hours of work erased" -- fuck.)

you can still access (for now) Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content via the invaluable Internet Archive, and pre-Disney-era content from The New York Times (which I partnered with from 2010 through 2013). And obviously, we’re trying to recreate some of the most popular parts of FiveThirtyEight at Silver Bulletin.

The rest of the article is basically a history of Silver's career in building/running FiveThirtyEight and some of the drama surrounding it. Wonderful view into a truly successful top writer/data analyst.

the site covered one of the most tumultuous periods in American political history with its unique blend of analytics, brutal honesty and irreverence.

why we like it, why I have always respected Silver, his commie/wokeness-leaning shite aside.

The platform he built always sat very poorly with Disney/ESPN:

In hindsight, I chose poorly. [...] The b-school way to put this is that there was never brand or incentive alignment — with Disney being very “macro” (it takes huge swings: theme parks, Marvel movies, NFL rights deals) and FiveThirtyEight being very “niche”.
this sort of arrangement [do what you will, we're proud of you, here's money] makes you extremely dependent on your bosses’ goodwill, and Skipper abruptly left ESPN one morning in 2017 because of an extortion scandal.

Tell me about it!

Very interesting to read his honest reflections and recollections... and great that he so openly admits his mistakes and regrets.

Beautiful and tragic.