Dril

About

@Dril is a novelty Twitter account which gained a large fan following through its seemingly nonsensical tweets, similar to the Horse_ebooks Twitter.

Origin

The @dril Twitter made its first tweet on September 15th, 2008, with a simple tweet only reading “No” (shown below). Most of the tweets by the account share the opinion and follow seemingly random events by the fictional owner of the account as he goes through his daily life struggles with common topics such as the internet and politics. The actual identity of the account is still unknown, and only shares a connection with the website wint.co^[5] which only shows an email and its Twitter handle.

no
— wint (@dril) 15 september 2008

As of March 2014, the account has made over 4,000 tweets and has managed to gather nearly 95,000 followers. The mostly random tweets by the account often gather hundreds of retweets and favorites, and screencaps of the tweets are often shared on other platforms such as Tumblr.

Spread

While the account already gained popularity and attention on Twitter and other platforms over the years, one of the first websites to pick up on @dril was the entertainment website Head of Rothchild on October 19th, 2011,^[3] where he became their first and eventually only inductee to their Twitter hall of fame, and was again mentioned in a tribute on February 5th, 2013.^[4]

Throughout 2012 the Twitter handle gained more attention and was mentioned in various top Twitter account ranking, such as on Mashable,^[8] Bite.ca,^[9] The Daily Dot,^[10] and Complex.^[7] That same year, @dril was also mentioned on the IGN forums^[11] and in a Something Awful Twitter Tuesday post.^[6] Two tweets of the account were also featured in comics by the Twitter: The Comic Tumblr blog. The first on December 26th, 2012(shown below, left),^[12] and the second on June 13th, 2013 (shown below, right),^[13] which managed to gather respectively over 250 and 5,800 notes.