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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   30479 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Nate Silver left FiveThirtyEight amid layoffs and Elliott Morris, ABC's new hire immediately set about ruining it. A threat he sent to conservative polling company Rasmussen Reports:

Rasmussen must explain the nature of its relationship with several right-leaning blogs and online media outlets, which have given us reason to doubt the ethical operation of the polling firm... Failure to reply, or failure to notify us of an intent to speedily reply, by the end of the day on Friday, June 30th, 2023 will be taken as a final concession of our grounds for a ban. The ban would take effect imminently thereafter.

As Nate Silver puts it, Why, unless you’re a dyed-in-the-wool left-leaning partisan, would having a “relationship with several right-leaning blogs and online media outlets” lead one to “doubt the ethical operation of the polling firm”?. I agree with Silver's overall attitude on the new direction of his company: hope ABC will stop use of 538 brand so it isn't associated with me.

Some people are probably mad at ABC for being partisan hacks but frankly that's business as usual. I'm mad because FiveThirtyEight was one of the only good analysis sites out there and these vandals are going to turn it into another factory pumping out generic progressive sludge. God damnit! 538 was the best in the business, where am I supposed to go for election forecasts now?

Stuff like this is why I'm longterm bullish on platforms like Substack. People ultimately don't care about 538 as an institution. They mostly just cared about Nate Silver's takes. I suspect this is true across many other media orgs. There's typically a few voices who actually matter and the rest are background noise. Paying people directly for their insights is ultimately a better model than subsidising a whole team indirectly, whom you are mostly not interested in.

It's a bit like why cable started to get a lot less interesting to people.

The thing about Substack is the majority of its successful writers are people who became well known (mostly through legacy media) before they joined substack - Greenwald, Sullivan etc.

The ‘discovery mechanism’ for Substack is essentially Twitter (and, to some extent, the blogroll of other Substack users, which still usually comes down to Twitter). Very different to a publication with many writers where you browse by article title or genre/section.

It’s almost the difference between coming here and every regular having their own blog. This way is more efficient.

That could be visibility that legacy media gave them but I’d make a different argument. That people needed the training of doing good reporter and learning how to work a beat and research. Seeing how the grey haired guy works sources and the process of research helps to develop talent. Substack isn’t going to develop guys but provides the opportunity for people to avoid editor bias and the suits business plan. Substack probably won’t ever being any good at training writers.

But neither are major newspapers. They found it is nore advantageous from a pecuniary perspective to just hire a bunch of 20 or early 30 somethings to write from Brooklyn. Doing hard hitting investigative reporting is hard; doing a report on the latest thing the president said while heavily mixing in your opinion is cheap and easy.

Substack created it's own Twitter-like feed a while back, and had links to them banned in response. You can use it to discover new writers, writers can interact with each other thus boosting each other's visibility etc. Things are still pretty slow, but if they reach critical mass, that's all they need for discoverability. I can also tell you that my response to Twitter login wall wasn't "I guess I'll install Twitter then", it was "I guess I'll install Substack then".

They used to let you see posts people liked by looking at their profiles, and I kept finding new substacks that way. It's a good bit more effort for me to discover good ones now.

A lot of what people cared about 538 for is the use of data and models far beyond what you see anywhere else (maybe not explicitly, but at least that people might have some idea of what's going on beyond idle speculation), and at least currently, 538 is still the best place for any of that that I know of.

Edit: just read further down that Nate Silver is the one with the rights to the models—guess 538 being the best may no longer be the case.

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