The “dril sold his account” theory is a case study in memetics and mass psychosis
or “I’m a very normal person who read 11,000 dril tweets in 5 days”
Memetics sees ideas as a kind of virus, sometimes propagating in spite of truth and logic. Its maxim is: Beliefs that survive aren’t necessarily true, rules that survive aren’t necessarily fair and rituals that survive aren’t necessarily necessary. Things that survive do so because they are good at surviving.
— Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar. 1999
I’m very much the kind of person who picks up a task or a project when I get an idea that seems funny enough, and then I have to see it through to the end, even if it turns out to be more work than I bargained for. I couldn’t suppress this personality flaw of mine a few weeks ago when I discovered a fandom.com wiki about dril, the infamous embattled influencer whose content you may recognize from “a certain website that will remain nameless, a website called Twitter.” The wiki had been left in a seemingly abandoned state since around 2018, so I took it upon myself to pick up where the original creators had left off.
I had already been digging through dril’s tweet history in search of characters from the “drilverse,” which are fictional or semi-fictional people whose usernames dril will occasionally mention, such as “MetalGearEric,” “Tekken Chauncey,” “Garth_Turds,” “SirGamestop,” and, of course, dril’s arch-nemesis “DigimonOtis.” My friends and I had all been regularly changing our Discord usernames to these names as an inside joke, so my goal was to compile a complete list of usernames we could rotate, which I didn’t anticipate would come out to almost three hundred names.
The means to this end should be obvious: I had to read every single dril tweet. I referenced dril’s archive of 10,000 tweets as well as this spreadsheet by reddit user /u/ImportantFancyMan and found myself faced with five digits worth of nonsequiturs to read and analyze with nothing but my own sad, sorry brain. And these archives only go up to the end of 2022, after which I had to finesse Twitter’s direly broken search feature to glean the remainder from the annals of history. Seven days and almost 1000 wiki edits later, I made it through to the other side, having learned a valuable lesson about gazing into the abyss long enough to leave you with the abyss gazing right back into you.
My main takeaway, besides the side effects on my conversational skills of filling my brain up with nothing but dril tweets, was that he has been impressively consistent with his style of humour over the last sixteen years. It’s not a style of humour that’s easy to describe, and better journalists than me have tried. The best non-comprehensive way I can put it is borrowed from other people: “absurdism and non sequiturs,” “compulsive nonsense,” and “unapologetically stupid.” The topics of dril’s posts occasionally reference current world events, cultural trends, and public figures, but not in a haughty or “trying to sound irreverent but without the wit to do it convincingly without sounding like I’m too far up my own ass” sort of way that we’re used to seeing on social media. His other tweets are often scatological or about bizarre fixations like cops, diapers, and jeans. But more often than not, his tweets are just About Nothing. I’d fancy myself an expert in worldbuilding after having attempted to make sense of any sort of continuity from his posts, which are designed not to have any to begin with.
The Theory
Now imagine my reaction when I take to Twitter to share the fruits of my labour, and my “For You” tab shows this post to me:
Having had just cross referenced thousands of such tweets against each other, I was baffled by this conclusion. What difference are we expected to see in those comparisons to make this “pretty clear?” Did 25,000 people beat me to the task of analyzing dril’s complete oeuvre and pick up on nuances that I’d failed to discern?
Looking through the replies, it’s pretty obvious that the answer is “of course not”:
Who Would Win: the real dril vs. the dril in your head
dril has never not been topical. Off the top of my head, he posted relentlessly about Barack Obama during his presidency, including riffing on the birth certificate conspiracy theory. He has openly criticized the United States military. He went on a tweeting frenzy about the 2011 Egyptian Revolution and argued with several other users. He posted eight times about “Octomom.” He was posting about Michael Jackson and his surrounding controversies in response to the news of his death, and both of these tweets are within the first fifteen that dril ever posted. Even his less controversial stuff has always been topical. He regularly posted about Justin Bieber during the height of the singer’s popularity. The entire #TheThursdayNiteRant saga was a satire on corporations’ perceived novelty of Twitter as a brand leveraging tool in the early-mid 2010s. He was frequently leveraging the discoverability of trending hashtags and buzzwords, which were often triggered by pop culture and current events, by posting nonsense (and sometimes scathing commentary) to them during most of the early years of his account’s tenure, back when this tactic still had some measurable success. He often used the #tcot hashtag for this, which, if you don’t remember, was for “Top Convervatives On Twitter” to find each other back in the days of the Old Internet’s last vestiges, when “finding each other” on purpose was a much more herculean task than it is today.
Some people chose to go a step beyond, making two incorrect claims in one post, such as “dril has no opinions” and “dril never replies to people”:
I also noticed that this reply to the discourse received no suggestion responses from any of the 200+ people who ostensibly saw it:
I decided to take this question a step further and help the skeptics out. I repurposed the sources I used for the dril wiki to program drilguessr, a guessing game that shows you a random selection of anywhere from 20 to 1000 dril tweets (until the end of 2022) and has you guess which year they were posted in (or an even easier version of the game, where you guess whether they came before or after a selected year of your choosing). My thought process was that if dril’s style has noticeably changed, and if this change owes to an alleged author handoff, then it should be a trivial task to categorize the account’s posts according to voice and subject matter into distinct eras fairly consistently over a large sample size of trials. It would be sort of like being shown a bit or a gag from The Simpsons, a longstanding comedy series that actually has changed writers and direction, and guessing if it came from the first eight seasons or not. A green score on drilguessr requires 85% correctness, and, to my knowledge, nobody has achieved this yet.
Incidentally, I opted not to include any tweets in drilguessr that had a media attachment or URL (as many are now broken links), which brings its pool to a total of 9,675 tweets — for the “dril never replies to people” believers in the crowd, take note: filtering replies out of this pool whittles the count down to 7,644 tweets.
Nevertheless, more tweets endorsing the account sale theory popped up and gained traction over the coming weeks:
The replies to dril’s tweets since early July have also been flooded with truthers (as well as several corn cobs insisting that dril “fell off” even though they keep coming back to his page several times a week for some reason), despite the subject matter of these tweets matching long-recurring themes like the diaper fixation:
Even this next innocuous post was subject to the same treatment, as if dril has never made up fake quotes and attributed them to drilverse characters before, let alone going all the way back to 2010:
Your Nostalgia Is Showing
The account sale theory is, in fact, nothing new, and dril even made fun of it as early as 2017:
But despite this theory being old hat, it’s never seen the level of virality it’s enjoying in 2024. How did we get to a state where this theory, having no basis in reality beyond just “vibes,” has become so popular?
To understand this, we need to go back in time. The candles tweet, arguably dril’s all-time most famous contribution to twitter, was posted in 2013, around the time his account most steeply spiked in popularity. It’s not a coincidence that this era was also when he was most actively posting on the site:
At that time, dril was popping up everywhere. Twitter users would see his posts retweeted into their feed and be curious about what his deal was, or they might have seen forum posts about him, or some feature mentioning him on whatever news sites they enjoyed, or even tumblr posts referencing his content with thousands of notes. They’d then go to google (remember, this is before google search sucked) and be met with his greatest hits and lore about his character on Know Your Meme or any site in its reference list, most of which drew from his Favstar (if you don’t remember what Favstar was or how ubiquitous it was in the early 2010s, here’s a rundown). All this is to say that in the era during which most of these conspiracy theorists became dril fans, they were mostly exposed to his tweets that had already seen widespread success, aka a small selection of 40 or so of the over 5,500 tweets he had posted before the end of 2015.
I graphed the years of dril’s top 50 most-retweeted posts (according to ImportantFancyMan’s sheet) against the number of retweets they had, and the shape of that graph resembles the shape of the above graph. In what should be a surprise to no one, his posts in 2013–2015 were 3 times as popular as his posts are today while he was posting 3 times as often in in 2013–2015 than he is today.
Sale truthers are comparing their nostalgia for a small handful of posts to the entirety of his modern day content, the latter of which is not all that different in terms of theme, sense of humour, or memorable-to-forgettable ratio from what he was posting ten years ago. There’s actually a term for this, and it’s called recency bias.
Funnily enough, OP surmised that this might be the case, and would have been correct if they’d stuck with that explanation:
Another source worth mentioning of the lower (but still steady) engagement on his posts has to do with how web content has evolved over time. Social media algorithms have evolved to overwhelmingly favour media content, but dril’s schtick has stayed so much the same since 2009 that his content is still mostly text-based — only 892 (8%) of the 11,386 tweets in ImportantFancyMan’s sheet have media attachments. Primarily text-based humour is a stronghold from the era in which the character was established, back when only 20% of Americans owned smartphones and we still mostly posted to the site over SMS (something you can no longer do!)
We’re Not 17 Anymore
Some people who are less than convinced of the conspiracy theory argue that the account has changed, but that this isn’t a bad or nefarious thing:
This is a take I personally like, especially the use of “a bit” here. I was just starting my freshman year of university when dril first created his account, and I remember the landscape of the internet pretty vividly as an adult during the time that would be considered his “prime.” I’ve never believed the account has really changed that much at all, and I believe it even less after reviewing his entire post history in a short timespan. I don’t mean to say the humour is stale or stagnant, but rather the subject matter themes and irreverent comedy style have remained mostly consistent for the account’s tenure. dril might use caps lock less, his feud with DigimonOtis might be over, and he’s (believe it or not) less vulgar with his word choices than he was in 2010, but the absurdist and sometimes topical and culturally-informed nature of what made his posts funny to us has never left. dril “has changed” because the context of the world we live in, the world he satirizes, has changed. He posts about Israel bombing Gaza in 2023 instead of posting about the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. He makes fun of NFTs in the 2020s instead of making fun of the awkward engagement attempts by brand accounts in the mid-2010s. He posts about COVID instead of Michael Jackson’s funeral. He satirizes things that are topical now just like he satirized things that were topical 10 years ago, 10 years ago.
But the biggest identifiable change of note is that dril breaks character more often than he used to — not that his beef with Rob DenBleyker nor his annoyance with drilhistorian are even close to the first time he’s done that, and I’d argue that his tweet about military service from eleven years ago is one of the earliest examples of him doing so. The thing about dril breaking character is that he has not been particularly concerned about his anonymity for a very long time. He had his own Adult Swim show, currently performs comedy at live events, and streams on Twitch semi-regularly. In early 2018, he posted voice recordings politely asking people not to reply to him (and this voice, I should note, sounds exactly the same as it does on the Twitch stream, so if you’re still convinced of the account sale theory, you should consider narrowing down your window to 2017 or earlier), and even this was met with disappointment and confusion over the broken immersion. I don’t know if there’s a polite or diplomatic way to say that, yeah, this would be extremely annoying for anyone to hear on repeat, especially over the course of a near decade, and that should be an easy enough position to understand or sympathize with — but then again, this is Twitter’s user base we’re talking about here.
The truth is that everyone knows deep down that there are writers behind the things we find funny, and dril breaking character is less a piece of evidence supporting the sale theory and more just a thing that forces people who grew up reading dril tweets in their formative years to lament that broken immersion. We all saw another example of how invested dril’s fans were in their illusion of his character when they were more concerned about his identity being doxed than he was, tweeting things like “I will not let you guys ruin the last good thing on this website. Protect dril, respect dril, leave dril alone” while dril was posting “im some guy named paul dochney who cares big whoop.” The dril character illusion is something that he hasn’t been invested in for a very long time (if ever), but some fans have been so parasocially invested in it that they’re choosing en masse to believe baseless theories over coming to terms with reality, and once again holding an illusion he doesn’t care about against him.
That point brings me to another element of the sale theory’s virality that I identified after checking out a small sample of Twitter bios of people who agree with it. One account says “born 1997.” Another posted to celebrate their 18th birthday in 2023. Another reveals they are a “23y Male.” Another mentions being a graduate college student, so likely late 20s. While this isn’t the case for every truther, it’s worth noting that 34% of Twitter users are 18–24 years old and 37% are 25–34 — everyone in this user majority currently aged 28 and under was still in high school (or lower) when dril posted the candles tweet. It stands to reason that most people’s senses of humour mutate (I won’t say “evolve”) between childhood and adulthood. Did dril actually change, or did people just grow out of things they enjoyed as teenagers, as most people do? Did he sell his account, or does it simply make you uncomfortable that a comedian you treated as a symbol of a bygone decade is forcing you to face the reality that you’re just getting old?
Our Brains Suck At Remembering Stuff
Perhaps nothing demonstrates the recency bias of dril truthers more than posts like these ones, accusing him of paying for Twitter Blue or “hiding” his subscription amidst accusations of selling his account:
dril posted for years about his ineligibility for verification status until Elon Musk made the feature meaningless by allowing anyone to pay for it. dril criticized this move by popularizing the #BlockTheBlue campaign, encouraging everyone to block anyone who paid for a blue checkmark, and Elon responded by forcibly adding Twitter Blue to dril’s account out of spite. After this, dril has since changed his display name every few days, which removes the checkmark until Twitter staff manually re-verify it. This is a well-covered series of events, and it only began in 2023. Are we supposed to believe that sale truthers, who fancy themselves experts on the evolution of dril’s content but don’t remember extended sagas from only a year ago, are reliable enough narrators with photographic enough memories to convincingly demonstrate exactly how the account reeks of having changed hands?
The Motive Makes No Sense
Even if truthers weren’t plagued with recency bias as well as short and long term memory loss, there are still some pretty major holes in the account sale theory. What’s the ROI on an unmonetized twitter account that hasn’t even promoted dril’s books in years and only really ever advertises a Twitch stream that he once described as a “non-profit?” Why would somebody buy a 2 million follower account just to hemorrhage money from it?
I’ve seen it pointed out (though I haven’t done the research to verify it myself, so take it with a grain of salt) that the account sale rumours originated from less than scrupulous sources, which suggests (and the psychological element to recency bias and stubborn glorification of nostalgia would support) that people who perpetuate it might be falling for a psyop:
It’s also worth mentioning that dril comes from the Old Internet, when people were generally better at identifying voice in written posts, which was a skill that people who grew up on forums developed to handle the reverse scenario (identifying two accounts owned by the same person trying to appear as different people). This has become something of a lost art now that everyone’s opsec sucks and it’s easy to figure out who’s who without needing any kind of online literacy skills training:
The Mass Psychosis
“Mass psychosis” is clickbait. I’m not a doctor, I can’t diagnose the general population with that. But the virality of conspiracy theories has been studied academically for a long time, and it is a more important field of study than ever with the rise of things like QAnon and the consequences of buying into that nonsense. I think it’s safe to say that nobody is going to murder anybody else over an argument about whether dril sold his account or not, but the study of conspiracy theory psychology has produced some poignant takeaways that feel especially relevant to the last four or five years in ways that I think you’re smart enough not to need me to spell out for you:
The Takeaway
- Don’t believe everything you read on Twitter, even if it tickles your very human psychology just right. You think dril changed writers because our brains as humans are wired to produce the right conditions to make that an easy thing to believe, even if it’s fake.
- Don’t believe everything you read on Medium, either. Hell, maybe I’m lying about most of this stuff. (But probably not, since there are sources littered throughout this piece.)
- I am begging dril truthers to internalize the reality that truth does not always have to be weirder than fiction.
- dril and derek’s stream is funny and you should watch it if you’ve ever been a fan of either of their content. Be warned that regular viewers think the account sale theory is the dumbest thing they’ve ever heard.
- Please don’t put in the newspaper that I got mad about a dril conspiracy theory.
- Play drilguessr, I guess, and see if you can be the first person ever to get a green score on 50+ or higher.
- Or do something more productive with your life than trying several times a week to convince a guy who doesn’t know you that you think he fell off, I felt pretty bad for the people I saw doing this. Just don’t pivot to emulating me, the most normal dril fan of all time, by reading 11,000 tweets in a week. You could tell me after reading this article that I should pick up a foot ball, and I’d agree with you.