[zombittack]

At this point in my life I have zero patience or sympathy for the story of a man selling his company to a massive conglomerate and then feeling betrayed or somehow sad/regretful when said conglomerate destroys it or weaponizes it. I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling. They don't care about us. That means even you, Nate Silver. Btw was a big fan back then! Signal and the Noise was a great book.

[fasterik]

There's value in making more people aware of something, even if it appears obvious to you. It's possible that someone who doesn't share your views on Disney, or corporations more broadly, might have been familiar with FiveThirtyEight and will have their views changed by Nate Silver's account of the situation. There's also nothing wrong with someone reflecting on something they worked on for over a decade and identifying things they could have done differently.

Ironically, your comment adds nothing to the discussion other than virtue signaling that you're "in the know" on this subject.

[halJordan]

I'll disagree. As an open forum, all responses are allowed, even telling someone to sleep in the bed they made.

But it does bring up a good point. That too many people are trying to have their cake and eat it too. Any reasonable person does, or ought to know, the cycle 538 went through. And we need to stop giving the benefit of the doubt to reasonable people who say "well I'm the one who didn't"

[_carbyau_]

Maybe I'm old but this smells like a new generation coming to terms with the concept of a sellout. It's not new.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selling_out

"While this perceived inauthenticity is viewed with scorn and contempt by members of the subculture, the definition of the term and to whom it should be applied is subjective. While the term is most associated with the 1970s- and 1980s-era punk and hardcore subculture, English use of the term originates in the late 19th century."

[pjmlp]

As GenX and to bring the usual generation discussion, it appears the more recent ones are too fluffy, like expecting everything nice, do no harm, feel betrayed when it was already obvious from the start how it would end up, and so on.

[freediddy]

Cue the Mad Men meme: "THAT'S WHAT THE MONEY'S FOR!"

[bambax]

This comment is maybe a little too aggressive but I kind of share the sentiment. Mostly, after reading this long article, I'm surprised he never quite explains why he never tried to go at it independently? He says

> I’ve always had a fairly entrepreneurial spirit

but that doesn't square well with being a cog in the huge Disney machine.

[Bratmon]

He's been independent since 2023

[applfanboysbgon]

> I'm simply tired of this hindsight virtue signaling.

Virtue signalling is a funny term. What, exactly, does it mean here? In what way is reminiscing about a venture that lasted 15 years of your life "virtue signalling"? It seems to be that word is trotted out as a meaningless cliche, something in the sense of "I don't like this thing, but I'll sound more sophisticated if I accuse it of this nebulous bad thing rather than just saying I don't like it".

The man is allowed to write a blog post about the final conclusion of a huge phase of his life. You don't have to give him your sympathy, but there's nothing wrong with writing about it.

[pclmulqdq]

The "virtue signaling" is signaling being a scrappy creative type who regrets/disliked the path he followed when he actually sold out to a big conglomerate at the first possible opportunity. The virtues being signaled are things like independence and grit.

[applfanboysbgon]

Perhaps you read a different blog post than I did, but that's not what he signalled at all. He regrets getting involved with ESPN specifically because it was a poor fit for him as a television network that didn't have a suitable business model for 538, and would have preferred if he had taken the competing offers from NYT or Bloomberg in 2013 and then wanted to move to The Athletic in 2018. At no point did he say anything like "I wish I didn't sell 538 and stuck it out alone".

[matt_daemon]

It kind of ended up being a funny dance between 538, the NYT and The Athletic. The original sale to The Athletic probably would've made the most sense for 538 (in hindsight). Then the NYT obviously realised what they'd lost with 538 departing, and end up buying The Athletic a few years later.

[cvoss]

I don't understand the use of the word "actually" in this sentence. The second half does not stand in contrast to the first half. In fact, it explains the first half.

And portraying oneself as having independence and grit when one doesn't actually (which I don't concede happened here) is not what virtue signaling is. "Virtue" here more closely means "morality" than "admirable or sympathetic qualities". Virtue signaling is disingenuously behaving like you are a moral person because it is advantageous, when in fact you lack such morals.

I feel the need to belabor this because accusations of virtue signaling are too often unfounded and amount to a cheap trick to shut down more thoughtful discussion.

[shermantanktop]

“Virtue signaling” has become a thought-terminating cliche.

All it really amounts to is an accusation of insincerity motivated by vanity, which is a two-for-one ad hominem attack that allows the accuser to avoid responding to the actual point.

[burritoAlPast0r]

It is a statement on a culture that values insincere "feelgoodery" over truth. We can decry the downfall of common sense even if it comes at the expense of pointing out the obvious. Imo this is a good trend.

[applfanboysbgon]

> insincere "feelgoodery" over truth

This has literally nothing to do with the article, and really nothing to do with almost any usage of the term I've seen. I pretty much always see it as a kind of incoherent insult that, like this usage here, isn't based in any kind of reality but instead just makes the person writing it feel good about themselves for some reason.

[Barbing]

Easy phrase for rude folks to trot out when someone raises ethical/moral/legal concerns. Quick little rationalization:

_other person says they care about thing I don't that admittedly does sound good, so it has to be wrong to have mentioned it - I can't just say I don't care about the good-sounding thing_

(Of course, on the internet, people will end up playing make believe with their values, but it shouldn't be the first assumption. Or maybe it should, but with a hard second look.)

[shermantanktop]

But I could accuse you (to be clear, I'm not) of making that statement out of a desire to "virtue signal."

You are stating your opposition to feelgoodery, thereby currying favor with those in your anti-feelgoodery camp by showing how anti-feelgoodery you are. But secretly of course I'm saying you don't really believe that. You are not that opposed to feelgoodery, you're just trying to get brownie points and make yourself feel good (ironically).

Again, that's not what I think, but IMO that's what the use of the phrase has mostly become.

[smcin]

Moreover, under Silver's deal with Disney for 2013-8 he "retained ownership of his proprietary models.... Disney owned the brand, the IP, and the archive" [0]. Then apparently in 2018 that arrangement expired and Silver decided to leave. Now in 2026 Disney deleted the archive without announcement.

So it sounds messy, but I don't understand Silver's complaint: what did he lose now in 2026, if he had 5 years to back things up starting in 2013? Is he complaining that he lost legal rights to use his IP? or never retained a license to his IP? surely not that Disney physically deleted the archive, 8-13 years later in 2026, why would that even affect him? NYT still has archives of his work from 2010-3. (or was it the SEO effect of the backlinks from the 2013-8 archive?)

Also, he had a choice whether to sell to sports website The Athletic or Disney (The Atlantic was a third interested party but didn't bid). In [0] he says:

> We came quite close to securing a deal with The Athletic... the potential deal with The Athletic hit a last-minute snafu, which there might have been time to work around if there hadn’t been a hard deadline imposed by Disney, but Disney needed a decision from us.

(Well who's responsible for that negotiation, if not him? Anyway how do we know The Athletic deal wouldn't have gone south eventually too, after a decade?)

In any case it's quite possible that with media consolidation, the archives of his models (for 2014, 2016, 2018 elections) would or will go away eventually. In which case, what's the lesson learned about licensing or retaining non-exclusive rights to his own past work? I only see his complaint, no lesson-learned about what he should have done. And even if he sold/relinquished all rights to it back in 2018, I don't see why he couldn't have had someone else clean-code and replicate that work. (Like the days of x86 licenses, or other blackbox reverse-engineering.)

(I try to avoid the term "virtue signaling" on HN regardless when it is/isn't merited, it seems to raise the temperature of the resulting discussion and move it away from the facts, it tends to get read as an ad-hominem).

[0]: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/nate-silver-rev...

[jredwards]

I think you can both be sad that something you built was destroyed, and also aware that you already sold it and are not somehow personally a victim.

[sixtyj]

His book is really good reads indeed.

Sometimes you get an offer that is financially irresistible. And after thousands of hours of hard work you finally get some reward.

Betrayed? That’s why people have lawyers to let them draft really good contract proposal so they aren’t ripped off.

But public whining is somehow a common tactic for getting attention online :)

[johnnyanmac]

> But public whining is somehow a common tactic for getting attention online :)

Because it works. Not all the time, but a significant number of times. Public backlash from a fanbase is a lot cheaper than a legal battle.

We're well into the attention economy these days. I don't blame someone for using the tools society dealt out to its effect.

[panda888888]

I wrote this exact comment elsewhere on the thread and got downvoted for it. Business is business! It sucks for Nate but he's acting like a sore loser, when this is a totally normal and expected outcome. Businesses acquire other businesses and sunset them all the time. Zero sympathy from me.

[macintux]

Sore losers don’t generally write at length about their own mistakes and poor decisions that led to the ultimate demise of their baby.

[Barrin92]

they do since Substack was invented because it turns out a digital rehabilitation facility for whiny and overly wordy sore losers is a fantastic subscription business.

Might want to think about selling that one to Disney as well and then writing about your great regrets of selling your substack on substack v2 in ten years, that's gotta be amazing content for another ten posts

[smcin]

What are your criteria for recognizing a useful insightful blog into a poster's previous business ventures?

Few tellers are neutral and objective, many writers get accused of selectively editing things: Philip Greenspun's account of the demise of Ars Digita springs to mind. Or Jerry Kaplan on Go (mobile startup). Or Joel Spolsky on the last decade of StackOverflow.

[panda888888]

Maybe it's just a stylistic choice, but if this happened to me, I wouldn't write a long post about it. I'd tweet, "They deleted the archive; what a sad end to this chapter of my life" (or something like that to let the world know what happened & that I was disappointed), but I wouldn't write a long rant. Maybe a short blog post, maybe.

I don't view his post as useful or insightful, but instead view it as demonstrating a lack of understanding of normal business practices. It's like he didn't anticipate that this could happen, whereas it's always a risk when you sell out. The exact same thing has happened to lots of other small blog/media outlets, like Kara Swisher's Re/code. This isn't an unexpected situation, but he's acting like it is. And that simply demonstrates a lack of maturity.

[panda888888]

Sore losers absolutely complain. It's one of the biggest traits of being a sore loser.

A mature person would be disappointed, vent to their close friends/spouse, and then shut up about it. They wouldn't publish a long blog post to air their grievances.

[mohamedkoubaa]

You don't need to have sympathy to accept that these chimp outs are virtuous for entirely pedagogical reasons.