Scissors beat paper, and a message beats slop. Any kind of message inserted into a video or a website, however low effort it looks, can stand out, but only if the message is good enough. You see this all the time: low quality or high quality videos, videos with an incredibly interesting story and distinctive traits that help them reach your feed, websites that look completely generic but attract a lot of people. All of that counts. All of it tends to get people commenting. So the message wins over everything.
People who have studied design for a long time, or development, know what good architecture feels like and can recognize it. Good drawing is recognized by experts, and so is everything good. But that’s not enough.
This happens to me a lot with taste and creative direction. Many messages don’t end up powerful because they focus on fixing what they shouldn’t, on the wrong things, on the parts that don’t add to the story, or they try to change it.
In the new era of AI, people who never could build apps are doing it now, and they find that existing isn’t the frontier to beat. You can see, then, that the message matters beyond the technique, the frameworks, the colors and how it was made. Slop can win if it’s used perfectly well. The message always mattered.