I have no idea how I haven't seen this before.

So, I was doing some light research this morning when I came across and interesting blog post that I somehow missed first time round. Back in March of this year Anti-Snark did a pretty good article on Bengo.

Actually, it's a damn good article. I'm not usually one for that sort of blog personally, but that article is spot on. Well done.

In the article Piratezim covers Bengo's inability to understand what How To Make Webcomics is actually going on about, his refusal to actually post evidence or even the statistics he claims to be looking at, his distrust of Dumbrella, his taste for libel, his failure to understand fan behaviour in any way and other flaws in the good old Floating Lightbulb.

"After this less than damning evidence against Gran and Kurtz is presented, Gordon begins the most troubling part of his "report." He begins listing names of people he believes are fake Twitter accounts, with nothing more than the names of the people he thinks created them. Failure to grasp the behavior of Twitter in the hands of webcomics fans will be Gordon's undoing; these people are merely fans who wanted to follow their favorite creators. They signed up for Twitter just to follow these people, because otherwise they'd have no reason to have a Twitter account. People really are capable of realizing that their lives aren't interesting enough for other people to read about, and therefore feel no need to use this service for themselves. This behavior, continued in later blog posts by Gordon, is reminiscent of Senator Joe McCarthy naming suspected Communists, with no evidence whatsoever."

That's a pretty good point that Piratezim has there. Well, two actually.

Firstly the fact that not everybody does actually want to talk about themselves, or talk to other people even. Creator's Twitter accounts often contain a lot more than their RSS feeds do, showing off half finished sketch versions of pages, content in bonus galleries that the RSS feed doesn't pick up and posting links to comics and articles that they find interesting and well, if you enjoying one person's writing or art enough to want to know whenever they update there's a certain logic to the idea that you stand a good chance of enjoying the same comics and such that they do. It's good logic, which is probably why Bengo has failed to register the fact.

The second point is the comparison to Senator Joe "Foaming At The Mouth" McCarthy. It's a pretty good one, which I find hilarious considering Bengo's choice of subjects to write about. Mr McCarthy needed to show no evidence, only to state that such evidence existed in order to make his claims and in the same way Bengo feels that he is above giving evidence too. His word is good enough.

Bengo responded to these claims of journalistic bias with such nuggets as "Your assumption that I have enemies is hysterical writing. I'm sure I have some people who hate me because I've shone light on their behavior, but that's their issue, not mine" followed by "I don't have a manufactured grudge against Scott Kurtz. I have a real grudge. I did him a favor and he responded by being an absolute prick to my wife and I. That's the grudge, and the readership knows it".

Wait, what? So someone you have a grudge against because he acted like a prick to you and now you attack him at every opportunity isn't an enemy? Right...

Oh, and he claimed that Piratezim appeared to have a mental illness too. Does he do this with everyone? I wonder which one I'll have if he ever bothers to respond to this blog.

It's a good article. Go read it.

In other Bengo news, the top search result when I look for sites discussing Floating Lightbulb is now the Encyclopedia Dramatica article on him. I'm surprised it took that long considering how much more deserving his behaviour has been than many others who have had articles created about them.

Bengo is still a conspiracy nut and he doesn't think much of Twitter

This Halloween I decided to dress up in my Kris Straub costume and go trick or treat in Bengo's neighbourhood, but could I find his house? Not at all. Next year I'm hiring a better class of private detective.

Having failed in my task, I returned my attention to his blog and does he have a treat for us this time? Well, that depends on how much you like reading the ramblings of someone who when faced with an idea he can't fully understand waits for its downfall, not quietly, but publicly predicting it.

You see, Bengo thinks Twitter's gonna die soon and it's all because it's too successful for it's own good. That's right. A large user base causes sites to fail, just look at the likes of MySpace and Facebook and how they crashed and burnt when their user base got too large.

Oh wait... scratch that and let's start again.

Here's Bengo's latest post, with a few additions of my own of course.

"Last year, News Corp. offered to buy Twitter for $500 million dollars, but was rebuffed. I think News Corp. dodged a bullet.

I cannot figure out a way for Twitter to overcome its inherent flaws. It suffers from mathematically provable problems that make it a candidate to be the next Pets.com. -Mathematically provable, huh? So do you have any of those formulas to share with us then?

A school of anthropological research concerns itself with efficient sizes of human groups. The most coherent groups, in which all members know the inter-relationships of all other members, are theoretically limited by the Dunbar Number, which equals about 150. History shows again and again that social units like agrarian villages and military units optimize near this level but not beyond it, at which point bureaucratic control impairs coherence. - Ah, because physical interaction between individuals linked by shared surroundings or employment can be compared to the interactions of individuals on the internet without any adaption for the differing methods of communication and interaction.

Twitter has two math problems. The first is that the incentive to gain followers pushes most players to try an gain audience share. - Really? Most people I follow just talk to their existing friends there, follow a few celebrities and tell their readers that they have one if they're interested. No big deal if they're not. I can't say I've seen MOST people try and inflate their numbers. - As audience size increases, the intimacy level decreases. We have a problem of dilution. Because Twitter users do not interconnect as a unit, a user can go well beyond the Dunbar number, but ultimately the same limiting principles kick in.

The second is that as each Twitter member receives more and more tweets, more go unread and unacknowledged. Twitter lost its usefulness to get a question answered about a year ago, - Your personal experience is not everybody's. Different people follow different numbers of people. There is no uniform amount. - and frivolity has replaced functionality. This is a problem of magnification. If everyone expands their tweet reach by a factor of ten, we are all overwhelmed by the number received. As institutions are advised by PR gurus to join Twitter and broadcast tweets, the number of mouths will exceed the number of ears. It's shouting into the darkness. - I follow the people who I care about. I do not care about 'institutions' and so do not follow them. 

Some Twitter members have been invited to use a new feature, called Lists, to parse people into subgroups for purposes of prioritizing. This is a red flag. It suggests that Twitter's brain trust perceives the math undermining the model. It also smells of desperation: they don't know how to blunt the math problem, so they have subdivided it into numerous math problems, or more precisely, a sociopolitical math tangle. - Alternatively, this is called improving your product and finding new useful features that your customers can take advantage of. If a supermarket opens a clothing section, does it prove that they are failing to sell groceries and are on the verge of going under? Probably not.

Next comes the return of the anthropologists, who will observe that lists are more likely to be sorted by status than any other category. The result: hard feelings, cliques, and finding yourself on lists with titles like "kooks" or "people who talk about food too much." - Or "Webcomic People", "Family", "The (-insert sport of choice here-) Team" or "College Friends". You know, things like that. Lists do not have to be about importance and I don't know anyone on Twitter who does sort people that way. They can be used to simply make checking your updates manageable.

Efficiencies in social networking are illusory unless you can monopolize them. The din of everyone chatting away to hollow empires of followers is likely to yield to networks that offer precision and value over network size. - The purpose of my Twitter is to keep up to date with the people I care about and to keep up to date anyone who cares on my own status in life, or my failure to update a comics strip on time. The problem with Twitter is only a real problem if you want it to be something it isn't. It is not a primary tool in the promotion of comics. It's a way to talk to people, in groups and on a personal level. You can use it any way you like."

I would leave it there, but oh no, there's more!

You see, Bengo turned commenting back on for this post and then he turned it back off again.

Here are the now missing comments. I'm making them all different colours, so they look like some unholy, eye burning IRC chat, because I can.

Fire Cock - You are on my "kook" list

Fire Cock - But in all seriousness how do you think that a more focused network would work, exactly? Do you think it not have to categorize its constituents into some sort of hierarchy? Alternately, could Twitees not prune their own subscriptions down?

ScratchinPost -Dude, why's yer site all, like, ugly?

Kez - Testing...testing...

Bengo - Thanks, Kez. It works. 

The first three comments are from internet curiosity J. Shagam, aka "fluffy," who uses pretend and hijacked identities to add a dimension of emotional disturbance to our proceedings.
Moderation has been turned back on until she finds something better to do. You can find her on Twitter as fluffy, if you find the extra hassle she creates is worth bringing to her attention. I'd have to warn you it puts you at risk of stalking.
We've kept a perfect streak here on this blog: every single person who arrives with an agenda of making a nuisance of themselves is actually a webcomic artist, generally not well known. That's 4/4, and none of them were topics of criticism or even topics at all. Interesting.
As for the commenting problem, I guess something got tangled in the network and got fixed. :)

fluffy - I did not post any of those comments. This is the first comment I've even tried posting since you previously slandered me. I only even know about them because someone linked me to this page to let me know you were continuing to pull this crap.

Knock it off, Bengo.
I still have no idea why you think I'm behind this but IT. IS. NOT. ME.
I don't give a crap what you think about me at this point but I'd rather you not try to blame me for every single negative comment directed at you.

fluffy - Oh, and just to be perfectly clear: For the record, before your previous slander against me, the last comment I tried posting was this one back in June. After that point it became clear to me that you truly had no interest in anything I had to say, and so I stopped trying to post anything, like any sane, rational person would do.

I will repeat here what I said on my own comic site when I first learned about your accusations against me:
I'd just like to point out that between my full-time job, my comics, and my music and audio production projects, I barely have time to do all the things that I enjoy doing, so why would I spend every waking hour posting "dozens of missives, ranging from polite to deranged, from various genders, stolen identities, nationalities, etc.?" He doesn't even have the decency to provide a single shred of evidence, so I ask that you just apply some critical thinking. In short: I have not done any of what he is claiming, and I don't even know if anyone is doing what he's claiming.

This is the ONLY profile I have EVER used to comment on your blog. If you have proof otherwise, I urge you to share it, but in the meantime you are just spouting off a bunch of hot air.

Sometime between that last post and now the commenting system that Bengo had 'accidentally broken' before then fixed got broken again. I'm shocked. Really, I am. It's so unfortunate that we never got to see Bengo's response and the evidence that he must obviously have.

He couldn't have turned it off again could he?

Nah. What a silly thought.

So, does anyone want to guess what Bengo's next subject will be? I'm surprised he hasn't done awards yet, seeing as he has a history of showing distain towards them and the Webcomic Readers Choice Awards is currently live and there seems to be one at thewebcomiclist.com too.

Wait... The Webcomic List?

That would be these people right? Jeez, those people are mean, but you know, that oppernaR fellow must be telling the truth right, because all of the critics that Bengo faces are really the same person, aren't they?

You know, something fishy's going on here. Let's see... Ah, yes, I see. Fluffy starts a thread and all these 'people' start taking her side and some of them appear to be involved in this award thing of theirs. Suspicous huh?

Let's dig deeper. Let's see who the awards people really are. Hmm... don't know them.. don't know them... Brad Guigar? The Half-pixel guy? Half-pixel are in on this!? And what's this? Jessica Ottowell? Fluffy's fake account? She's in on it too!?

Oh my god, Bengo, you're right! It's all a conspiracy! They're out to get you Bengo! And they're all just one really big person! Run! Run! Run while you can!

I think I need to lay down for a while...

Edit:

Oh yes, I forgot to say. All credit to fluffy for saving those comments before they disappeared forever.