[patcon]

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]

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]

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

[opsnooperfax]

Pride comes before the fall. Sorry, Nate.