Captions are doing more work than your edit

Sound-off viewing is the default on every feed that matters. A video that only makes sense with audio is a video most people scroll past, regardless of how it was shot or graded.

Good captions are not a transcript. They are timed to the beat of the sentence, short enough to read in a glance, and positioned where the platform's own interface will not cover them. That last point costs more videos than any other detail.

The test is simple: mute it, watch it on a phone, and see whether you still know what the video is about in the first three seconds.