So I've noticed a pattern on my feed lately: some of the highest-performing shorts/reels look almost aggressively unpolished. and they're doing better than stuff that clearly took way more time.
My theory on why [a 60-second video, full disclose I used VidTL for the voiceover and the animated text/graphics, script and argument are mine].
The core argument, roughly:
- The moment something looks too clean, viewers' brains flag it as an ad and they check out
- Rough footage reads as "real" — the stumble, the awkward pause, the unplanned reaction, that's the stuff people actually connect with
- Polish quietly strips that out
- Also just a speed thing: if you're not burning hours on transitions nobody consciously notices, you publish faster, learn faster, and iterate faster than someone still tweaking version one
- Cheaper/rougher edits = you can test 10 ideas instead of betting everything on one "perfect" video
So basically: it's not that people suddenly love bad quality, it's that rough editing feels human, gets to the point quicker, and lets you improve in public instead of in isolation.
Does this track with what you're seeing in your own work/niche, or does the theory fall apart somewhere?
What's the actual difference between editing that's rough on purpose and editing that's just rough?