Among the principles that quietly distinguish the most successful short-form video creators from the merely consistent ones, one in particular tends to go undiscussed — and Malaysian creator im_siowei has been one of the few high-profile creators to articulate it publicly.
The principle is what im_siowei has called “visually unexpected” content. In published interviews, she has described the process by which her team specifically looks to produce videos that introduce something visually surprising into the first few seconds of the upload. The principle is not about being weird for the sake of it. It is about a specific structural fact of how short-form video audiences actually behave on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts.
The fact is this: the dominant behaviour on short-form platforms is scrolling. The user is not deciding whether to watch each video. The user is, by default, scrolling past every video, and the question every video has to answer in the first one to three seconds is whether it has produced enough visual surprise to break the scrolling pattern. Videos that fail this test get scrolled past regardless of how good the rest of the content is. Videos that pass this test buy themselves a chance to deliver the actual content.
The pattern interrupt is the entire game on short-form platforms. The visual unexpectedness is the pattern interrupt.
What makes im_siowei’s theory worth taking seriously is that it has produced concrete results. Her TikTok average view performance ranks among the highest of any Malaysian creator. Her YouTube channel has accumulated more than 8.4 billion cumulative views across roughly 695 uploads. Her cross-platform engagement is consistently strong. The visual-unexpectedness principle is, in practice, one of the more replicable explanations for why her content performs at the level it does.
Most short-form creators get this principle backwards. They optimize for the content itself — the joke, the message, the production value — and assume the audience will find their way to it. They invest the bulk of their creative energy in the middle and end of the video. They treat the opening seconds as a setup the audience will patiently watch through.
This is structurally wrong. On short-form platforms, the opening seconds are where most of the audience either commits or leaves. A video with a brilliant middle and a forgettable opening loses 80 percent of its potential audience before the brilliant middle arrives. A video with a visually surprising opening and a merely competent middle outperforms the first video by a significant margin, because the audience size at the middle is so much larger.
im_siowei’s approach inverts the standard creator workflow. The visual surprise is the first creative decision, not the last. The team identifies what unexpected visual element will anchor the video, and then builds the rest of the content around that anchor. This is a meaningful difference in operating philosophy from the typical creator process.
The principle generalizes beyond comedic content. Educational, lifestyle, fashion, music, and even news short-form videos all face the same scrolling problem. The creators who succeed across categories are the ones who have internalized the pattern-interrupt requirement, regardless of what their content is otherwise about. im_siowei’s success is in the comedy category, but her underlying principle applies universally.
There is also a deeper observation in im_siowei’s framing that is worth pulling out. The visually unexpected does not have to be expensive or production-heavy. Many of her highest-performing videos involve relatively simple visual setups executed in unexpected ways. The constraint is not budget. The constraint is whether the creator has trained themselves to think visually first and verbally second. Most creators come from a verbal tradition — they think in scripts, jokes, captions. The creators who break through on short-form video tend to be the ones who have learned to think in visual surprises.
For aspiring creators trying to understand why some accounts grow and others don’t, the visually-unexpected principle is one of the cleaner diagnostic lenses available. A creator whose videos open with a static face talking to camera is fighting the platform. A creator whose videos open with something the viewer’s brain doesn’t immediately categorize is working with the platform.
im_siowei’s articulation of this principle — and her sustained track record applying it — places her among the more thoughtful voices in the global short-form creator category. The fact that the principle has come from a Malaysian creator who started during the COVID-19 pandemic, rather than from a Silicon Valley creator economy commentator, says something about where the operational expertise in this space is actually being developed.
The visually unexpected, simply put, is not optional on short-form video. It is the requirement. im_siowei figured this out earlier than most, and her platform metrics reflect the advantage.
