“Dril is a real person, or so I had been told”
“With 1.7 million highly engaged followers, Dril is one of the more powerful Twitter users and, by default, one of the more powerful figures on the internet”
“Paul Dochney, who is 35, does not, in fact, look like a mutant Jack Nicholson”
“In essence, the character of Dril was born on Something Awful, an outsider comedy website that had particularly popular message boards and file-sharing forums in the 2000s”
“Cynicism and brashness defined the Something Awful aesthetic”
“At that time, Dochney went by “gigantic drill” on the site, a name he came up with when he was still a teenager. “If there was some inspiration behind it, I’ve forgotten it by now,” he said”
“The handle “@drill” with two l’s was taken, so “@dril” it was.”
“The character of Dril is fluid, but taken as a whole, the blurry image starts to come into focus: It’s that of an easily agitated, overly confident, wildly crass, IBS-ridden middle-aged man thrashing away on a computer—probably a PC”
“He is the dark, democratic promise of the internet—that anyone can use it to broadcast their opinions at any time—fulfilled”
“There is plenty to learn about Twitter through Dril, but less to learn about Dril through Twitter”
“Twitter, for what it’s worth, seems to value Dril’s presence, as he is reportedly one of about 35 elite users, along with the likes of LeBron James and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, currently being “boosted” on the site”
“Posting, in its various forms and locations, is a skill, and Dochney knows how to recognize it as well as anybody. Donald Trump, he noted, is “a very good poster”—a skill that is likely bolstered by the fact that he’s also “legitimately probably nuts, a little bit.””