The Strange Case of Static Text, Dancing People, and Unrelated Music

(Or: How to Manufacture a Viral Short Without Actually Saying Anything)

If you’ve spent any time scrolling through TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts lately, you’ve probably encountered a strange, almost surreal type of video. The formula is unmistakable: One or two short lines of static text, usually somewhere in the middle or top of the frame; a random person - often a female in a revealing or sexually appealing pose (because “sex sells”) - dancing, walking, or performing some unrelated action in the background (in longer versions often performing makeup); and a soundtrack that not only fails to match the imagery but often feels deliberately mismatched - yet it happens to be a currently trending audio clip. These videos are often under 30 seconds in length, and while they can be motivational, absurd, controversial, or entirely devoid of meaning, they still manage to rack up staggering view counts way beyond all meaningful content.

The magic here has very little to do with the “message” itself. You could write a message that demands to put up fridges for icebears in the Arctic. Instead, the real mechanism at work is a finely tuned exploitation of human attention and platform algorithms.

• The Structure: Layers of Attention
• The Curiosity Gap
• Seamless Looping
• The Low-Effort Production Pipeline
• Why It Works (and Why It’s Hollow)
• How to Make One (If You Wanted To)
• The Problem

The Structure: Layers of Attention

What appears to be chaotic randomness is actually a professionally crafted deliberate stacking of attention triggers. Those are not crafted by mistake or randomness but carefully refined by A/B testing of different formats and encapsulations.

First, there’s the foreground hook: the static text, which might be a joke, an opinion, a pseudo-inspirational quote, or even just bait to spark curiosity. This is what the viewer thinks they are engaging with. Behind that, there’s background motion - someone moving, dancing, or acting in a way that doesn’t relate to the text at all. This moving backdrop is important because human vision is naturally drawn to movement, especially in peripheral vision. Even if the text can be read in two seconds, your brain is compelled to keep watching until the background action feels “complete” which actually never happens.

The third layer is the audio bait. By attaching a trending sound, regardless of relevance, the creator gains algorithmic visibility because platforms actively promote content with popular audio. The result is an engineered split of attention between reading, watching movement, and unconsciously tracking the rhythm of the audio - a combination that keeps people watching longer than they intended.

Some videos take this a step further by cycling rapidly between two lines of text - often with the first line posing an open-ended or provocative question and the second line offering an answer or punchline. The switch happens just fast enough to make it hard to read both in one pass, prompting the viewer to watch the clip multiple times until they’ve “caught” the whole message. This is not an accident of what one perceives as bad design, the forced repetition is another clever way to drive up watch time without adding meaningful substance and thus boost viral performance of those videos.

The Curiosity Gap

When what you see and what you read don’t align, the brain instinctively tries to resolve the disconnect. You expect the dance to somehow relate to the quote, or the music to shift in sync with the punchline - but it never does. This unfulfilled expectation creates a tiny itch in your mind, and the easiest way to scratch it is to keep watching, or even replay the video to double-check. For the algorithm, this is gold: high retention, repeat views, and a strong signal that this content should be shown to more people. And often repetitions also get interleaved at the third or fourth repetition with advertisements. This is where revenue starts to be generated.

Seamless Looping

Another subtle but powerful trick is seamless looping. Most of these videos are short enough that they can loop without obvious start or end points. If you re-read the text, try to catch a fast-switching caption, or notice something in the background on the second pass, you’ve already doubled the watch time. From the platform’s perspective, a 200% watch rate signals exceptional engagement, which increases the likelihood of further promotion in recommendation feeds.

The Low-Effort Production Pipeline

One of the reasons this format has exploded is that it’s incredibly easy to mass-produce. A single clip of someone dancing or performing an unrelated action can be reused dozens of times. The creator simply overlays different captions and pairs each with a new trending audio track. This is content recycling at its most efficient: minimal new filming, maximum potential reach. For many accounts, this is less about individual videos and more about running a continuous conveyor belt of engagement triggers.

Why It Works (and Why It’s Hollow)

The underlying mechanism is remarkably simple:

1. Trigger curiosity through deliberate mismatch between elements.
2. Hold attention using layered visual and auditory stimuli.
3. Exploit the algorithm by using trending audio and generating long watch times.
4. Repeat endlessly with minor variations to maintain novelty without altering the core formula.

The problem is that the actual content is almost irrelevant. These videos are not built to convey meaning; they are built to extract attention. Once a large enough audience has been captured, some accounts pivot to entirely different goals - selling products, promoting political messages, or redirecting viewers to monetized channels. There are professional public relations agencies that re-use and buy accounts and pages with a huge number of followers or large reach. An account with tens of thousands of followers? Easily sellable.

How to Make One (If You Wanted To)

If you were inclined to replicate the formula, the process is extremely simple and straightforward:

1. Select a trending audio clip - ideally one that’s just hitting peak popularity. Select one that is usable free of charge without violating copyright. Or just craft your own with AI and your favorite digital audio workstation.
2. Record or source background footage - choose something with movement but no obvious narrative. Jump around in tight clothes, do makeup, walk along a street jumping around. It does not matter.
3. Overlay a short, highly readable caption - make it relatable, provocative, or oddly specific.
4. Keep the total runtime under 15 seconds - ensuring a high completion rate and seamless looping.
5. Publish in volume - success comes from frequency and iteration, not originality. Publish between 20 to 30 videos a day.
6. Experiment with fast-switching captions - to encourage multiple viewings from the same user.
7. Try out seamless looping - end your video with something that matches the beginning. This increases how often people iterate over videos with short sketches or content.

The Problem

The rise of this format says less about the ingenuity of creators and more about the incentive structures of social media platforms. When the algorithm rewards retention and watch time over substance or relevance, content naturally evolves to serve those metrics - even at the cost of meaning. The result is a stream of engagement artifacts that resemble content but are primarily vehicles for extracting time and attention. It leads to a decline in quality of the media feeds and massive increase in waste of time.

As a viewer, you’re not really consuming an idea or a message. You’re participating in a loop that exists solely to keep you in the app for a few seconds longer. The dancing, the text, the music - all of it is bait, carefully engineered to feed the platform’s machinery.

Most likely most platforms will at some point start to lose viewers with this kind of content - and have to reduce this kind of content promotion to increase user interactions again (when users start to feel braindead or the attention is not gathered any more since they get used to this kind of content).

This article is tagged:

• Opinion
• Internet
• How stuff works
• Psychology