Everyone predicts in January and finds out in December
The clustering is severe enough to be a structural fact about the genre, not a quirk of one archive.
August 29, 2026 · figures counted October 4, 2026
35% of the statements on this site were made in December or January — 44 of 126 records crowded into two months of the twelve.
Their deadlines sit at the other end of the year. A prediction made in January about “this year” comes due eleven months later, by which time the post that made it is long gone from the feed.
The gap is the problem
Nobody is present at the moment of settlement. The audience that read the prediction has moved on, the author has made a hundred claims since, and there is no occasion on which anyone checks.
That gap is not an accident of attention. It is structural: the forms that produce predictions — year-ahead posts, season previews, outlook pieces — are all published at the start of a period and never revisited at the end of one.
What closes it
A deadline recorded with the claim, and a page that shows what is coming due rather than only what was just said. 63 of 126 records here carry one, and those are the only ones that will ever get an answer.
Every claim here is checkable.
The exact words, the source and its date, the test fixed before the outcome, and what happened when it landed.