Reimagining Content Creator Roles Today

Social media is shifting, and creators are always told to adapt. "Crack the algo", they said. But why should we change when conforming makes us lose our minds?

Jan 08, 2024

Halo and Happy New Year everyone!

I hope all of you enjoyed your time with friends, family, and loved ones, and took a well-deserved break last holiday. 2023 was honestly my year and I hope it was yours too. Last year, I reached 20,000 followers on TikTok, went to Italy for three weeks, held several events in Jakarta, got into national TV, and most importantly, launched this newsletter that you are currently reading.

From the time it was launched in September 2023, Kepayang has connected with 84 subscribers and 200+ Instagram followers from around the world. We got subscribers from Indonesia, the USA, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Singapore, Denmark, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Turkey, France, Brazil, the UK, and the latest addition being Norway! So if you’re a fellow subscriber from this country, I would like to say thank you once again for supporting this platform!

This first post for this year will be a little bit reflective. It will be very niche and super specific as it looks into what I did as a food content creator last year. You know what they say, you gotta use your unfair advantage. So I’m going to use that to drag you into my world that is creating content.

If you have no idea about the content creation industry, this is the perfect chance for you to learn about it. You will read about:

💔 The changes in how social media operates and how the algorithms don’t actually work for the creator’s interest.

🤯 How cracking algorithms and chasing for virality could lead to burnout (unfortunately with a personal experience!).

🔮 An end-of-year reflection for me to come up with three mantras for the year 2024 which are: Curate, Address, and Empower. These are also the roles I believe I should serve to my community as a food content creator.

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An Indonesian feast me and my friend cooked for a New Year’s Party (Sydney, 2019).

It’s been almost two years since I quit my 9-5 job to start building a career as a food content creator, and to my surprise, I still often wonder about what gets me up in the morning. It all started in May 2021 when I uploaded my first TikTok video of me baking a vegan cookie - which if you ask me now, it was shit. But I love everything about creating food content. I love the process of coming up with the initial idea, the preparation, the chaotic execution, and the final touches that I can make during post-production.

For me, this entire regimen is more exciting compared to dragging my ass off to attend a weekly Zoom meeting on a Monday morning. But just like any hobby that turns into a job, it eventually became a bit repetitive and kind of dull after a while. So as soon as I realized that a job is… well… a job, I started to reflect on the things that keep me going as a food content creator.

This end-of-year reflection is very important for me, especially considering the love-and-hate relationship I’ve experienced throughout my career-building journey. It’s honestly a different ball game from working in an office. It requires a different set of skills, involves working extra hours (flexible, but extra), and to be financially honest, it’s very hard for me to be sure how much I’ll be making in a specific month.

On top of that, the whole content-creating industry is so wack today, mainly because of the decreasing attention span and how social media feeds are becoming more and more algorithm-driven. This may sound like a total nightmare for those who found comfort in stability that can be found in a more conventional sector. But by reflecting on my purpose and what it means to be a food content creator today, the entire journey now felt less like a nightmare and has filled me with hope for 2024.

Honestly, that’s some TED Talk type of shit to say. But please bear with me.

I started my reflection by recognizing the nature of the industry I’m dabbling - in food, content creation, and social media. It can’t be denied that the content creation industry has brought so many benefits to the players in the local community. With user-friendly filming and editing tools, and hyper-personalized algorithms, content is now being generated faster than ever while also ensuring it reaches its targeted audience. This infrastructure incentivizes all of the players. From social media platforms receiving more screen time, local businesses getting wider exposure, to creators attracting higher engagements.

But with all these shifts also came some compromises. For a content creator like me, this would mean losing focus on what I want to create.

The truth is, the algorithm doesn’t work for the creator. Sure it helped your content to get to the right audience, but most of the time, it works in a way that serves the platform more. Quoting Forbes (2022), “Algorithms often now curate content based on the number of views, making it increasingly difficult to be heard”. This makes it unsurprising if we see more and more creators shift their focus on cracking the algo and chasing for virality, which eventually increases the risk of burning out.

You see, without realizing it, when I started creating content for the algorithm, I started making content for whatever the hell is being considered as popular by the platform. For lack of a better word, I was dictated to create things for the masses, regardless of whether that’s what I’m into. For example, nearing the end of 2023, I dedicated a lot of time to creating a video series on cooking viral Indonesian food, from Es Kul-kul, Salad Buah, to Seblak Rafael. I don’t personally enjoy this type of food because first, it usually doesn’t have the nutritional value that I’m looking for, and second, most of the time it’s overrated and tastes just OK. But if cooking these viral foods gets me a thousand new followers, then who am I kidding?

But it turns out, I only got 28 new followers from those videos. Plus some food leftovers that I don’t really enjoy.

Unfortunately, as a creator, you don’t really have control over how the algorithm works and how your audience will respond to your content. So focusing on those bits makes zero sense. When my main objectives changed from creating content that I love to content that could potentially be viral, I started to define my success from the number of views, likes, comments, and shares that I received. I would find myself opening the clock app every hour, checking whether the views had gone up, and eventually feeling sad and disappointed seeing that only two people commented on my Mochi Bites video.

But my reflection says don’t worry, because guess what, I can focus on finding my purpose. Ask yourself, what is your role in the community and what value can you bring to the table? For me, this translates into having a clear and concrete list of the things that make me proud, things that I would find fulfillment in, and things I can help make a positive impact. Through reflecting on what I did last year, I came up with three key points that, in my belief, define a content creator's role in today’s community:

To curate information
To address social issues
To empower the community

(1) To Curate Information

Who? Curate? Never heard of her.

Today, we have a surplus amount of information. Some are worthy of our attention, and some are more clickbaity and contribute to nothing but a waste of our time and data. It’s everywhere. Need to book a table for two at that Chinese-Indonesian place down the road? Just go to Instagram, they probably have a reservation link in their bio. Want to know the best time to take your Vitamin C? Google it. Easy.

With this much information available at our fingertips, what will differentiate you, a creator, from a search engine or an encyclopedia? This is where the role of a curator started to be needed.

As a creator, I realized that my role is more than just to deliver or share information - especially those that are already available somewhere else. There’s a reason thousands of people followed me, and that’s because I curate the information for my audience.

First, I seek the information that I want to share, then filter out those that are off and keep those that are relevant, I comment on some, add my opinion, and lastly I craft and communicate the information in a way that is engaging and friendly to my audience. For me, that sounds similar to what Sarah Green defined as a curator.

“A curator cares for something, is a specialist, presents the collection, and knows the audience” - Sarah Green.

To give an example, let’s take a look at the topic of eating a balanced diet - something that I truly believe is important and I campaign over and over again for my Indonesian audience. I’m sure a regular Indonesian would say “Of course, I know what a balanced diet is. I went to school OK?’ if I started lecturing them with textbook definitions of what a healthy meal is. So the question is: how can I make sure the same information, can be well accepted, or rather, digested (haha) by my audience?

What I did is that I experimented with multiple formats to share the same underlying topic of eating healthy. For those who are more into cooking and more of a visual person, I would make video recipes of menus that highlight more vegetables and protein like this crunchy fried cauliflower or tofu nugget recipe. But this approach will be slightly different for those who are more into reading; for them, a written article like what I wrote last October, titled “Exploring Veggie Deficiency in Indonesian Diets”, that contains facts, numbers, and data might be more engaging. Doing this enables me to create a more personal relationship with my community, eventually boosting their trust in what I will share in the future.

The act of picking and choosing which information to serve is a very powerful act, thus making it important for creators to do it in a way that doesn’t reinforce certain existing power structures that contribute to inequalities.

This leads to my second belief that a content creator is also responsible for addressing social issues - be it implicitly by deciding which narrative to amplify, or explicitly through raising awareness and speaking up for a specific issue.

(2) To Address Social Issues

Here’s a recent example, I realized that when I was writing my latest stories on Indonesian Christmas food, I rarely heard stories from those outside of Jakarta and Pulau Jawa. This might not be a surprise for my fellow Indonesian readers as most news and information is still being heavily regulated by media centralized in Jakarta. But realizing that I, as a creator, have full control of what stories to feature is such an empowering moment for me.

I then decided to reach out to friends and other contributors in Sumatra and Papua to share their Christmas experiences and what their Christmas feast typically looks like. They talked about their favorite cakes, how chaotic their kitchen is during Christmas morning, to a tradition where some distant family members would come to visit and casually bring one whole fish for the entire family to cook together. The stories offer a fresh perspective that is just as Indonesian as those that have received more attention before. It’s such a heartwarming piece and it easily became the work that I am most proud of last year.

Another instance would be when I was raising awareness on the topic of food waste. An issue that is alarming in Indonesia in which most people are sleeping on it. I mean, yeah, I get it. Most of us don’t live near the tempat pembuangan akhir (landfills). So it’s hard for us to grasp the idea of how much food we are wasting and how crucial the situation is. I too have never been to the landfills, let alone having the power to shake things up or press for a policy review.

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This raises the question: If going down to the landfills is nearly impossible for me, what are the next things that I can do? Because surely, that shouldn’t be the only way for me to contribute.

I quickly realized that for this particular issue, my role as a creator could be as simple as directing people's attention to what is happening. So after some research, I eventually created some content for people to start talking about food waste. Like this one content where I called out the fact that on average, one Indonesian could produce 77 kg of food waste in a year, or another one where I was reading a news article on how farmers in Lampung were throwing out their fresh produce due to an extreme price drop. I was genuinely really happy to see how both of these videos slowly sparked some discussion on other ways we could mitigate the problem and utilize the produce.

These types of content might not be the most popular as people mainly use TikTok for entertainment. But as I wasn’t aiming for virality. Being able to address the issue and have it resonate with a few people is already more than fulfilling for me. I wanted to hope that through my content, I could help get the ball rolling even though it would probably be swept away in a few days by some A Day in My Life videos.

Having 23,000 followers on TikTok might not be a lot for some, but together with the growing number of independent media, news outlets, and creators, I’m confident that news and stories from underrepresented areas and groups will rise.

(3) To Empower the Community

Talking about community empowerment may sound like a huge thing that only a Nobel prize winner or a social activist could do. It feels like one should do some huge actions that result in a tangible and measurable change for a community to be called empowered. But I would beg to differ here because if that is what empowerment is for you, then that’s a very narrow definition of empowerment.

Empowerment can come in many shapes or forms, and identifying what this looks like should be very easy for us creators. For me, I started with understanding what my audience enjoys and what skills or knowledge they want to learn by simply asking. I would do this by ending my content with a question. It could be as straightforward as “What else do you want me to cook?” or could also be more abstract like “How do you feel about buying locally?”. These questions are very helpful in guiding me to decide what content I should create next as now I know what my community finds valuable. It could be as trivial as revealing a secret hack on how to make bakwan jagung (corn fritters) stay crispy longer, tips on how to easily peel a tomato, or something more educational like discussing which plant-based food source has the most amount of protein where people could benefit from learning.

Defining the success of how far this empowerment works could be tricky. To be fair, my content would not end poverty or bring world peace in a single night. I mean, that’s not the goal anyway. But what I found beautiful about a close-knit community is being able to hear their feedback. I remember, there was this one follower of mine who commented on my TikTok saying they had tried going vegan for two months and that my recipes had helped them a lot to decide what to eat that day - and honestly, slay.

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Personally, I found that being a content creator should not be driven by a transactional mindset. Things like a follower base may define how big you are and brand partnership can indeed pay your bills. But as this role requires resilience in terms of keeping up with the algorithms, navigating hate comments, and keeping yourself calm during slow seasons, it is important for us to see what else can bring fulfillment to this job. For me, something more transformational like being able to bridge the gap between my audience and information, knowledge, and skills is very rewarding.

In today’s sense, being a content creator is being powerful and vulnerable at the same time. It is so liberating when you realize that you have total control over what you want to say and create. But at the same time, an open ear to listen to what your community needs is crucial to help you sustain yourself mentally.

If you’re a fellow content creator, what do you think is your role today in your community? Let me know in the comment below!