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Talking to my buddy who runs a music promo page made me realize TikTok's algorithm rewards bad audio quality on purpose
He said they literally add static and lower bitrate to their clips because the algorithm flags crystal clear audio as 'too polished' and suppresses reach. Has anyone else noticed this pushing lo-fi vibes on purpose?
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dylan46320d ago
My buddy that does 100k+ views a week runs everything through a filter to clean his audio and hasn't seen any drop in reach. Pretty sure the algorithm just doesn't like low effort content with bad sound.
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fionam1120d ago
Filters are a lifesaver honestly. I started using a basic EQ and noise gate on my recordings about six months ago and my retention actually went up a bit if anything. The algorithm definitely punishes people who just hit record and upload without caring about the sound. Low effort garbage gets buried no matter what the topic is.
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young.thomas20d ago
Oh yeah, totally agree that cleaning up audio helps. But I'd push back a little on the idea that the algorithm specifically "punishes" bad sound. I mean, from what I've seen, it's more like bad audio makes people click away faster, which then hurts your retention, and retention is what the algorithm cares about. So it's less that the algorithm is judging your sound quality and more that it's reacting to how people behave when your sound is rough. A buddy of mine did a test where he uploaded the same video with great audio and then one with noisy audio, and the noisy one had way worse watch time. The algorithm didn't punish the noisy one directly, it just showed it to fewer people because nobody stuck around. So yeah, filters help, but it's all about keeping people watching.
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