A Year Retrospective (and Contest Announcement!)

Hello everyone,

In November 2024, I was given the opportunity to take on VidLii as my responsibility, at first as co-owner, and then later as its full owner. Now that a year has gone by since I first took on this responsibility, I've decided to write a short retrospective.

As stated in my post announcing that I had become VidLii's owner, I originally was brought on to clean up the site. With a year having passed, I can confidently say that the site has been reformed and is in a much, much better spot than it was back in 2024.

The video I made a year ago to announce changes to the site had more than just proclamations of new rules, it also had a number of promises - namely new features. While I was able to deliver on the moderation changes that were promised, I recognize that I have not fulfilled many of the features originally promised.
Honestly, I hugely underestimated the time, money, and effort required to deliver so many features to everyone. I also feel that the features were very unequal in actual practicality and importance. I strongly believe now that we should prioritize community-centric features - after all, community is what sets the site apart from the sea of other video sharing sites.

While I'm unhappy that we weren't able to deliver on all the features we wanted to, I'm very excited to announce a feature we've been working on for a little while:

Contests!

Back in the day, YouTube used to have contests that users could participate in by submitting videos. In my personal opinion, this was one of the coolest YouTube features that we lost to time.

As of today, we're launching the first VidLii Christmas contest! Submissions are open until December 11th, and then the community will be able to vote on submissions until Christmas day - when winners are announced.

While official contests are cool, letting community members organize their own contests opens up even more possibilities. Soon, partners will be able to host their own contests with all the same tools we're using to launch official contests. They will have the option of choosing the dates, times, and rules for their contests - along with anything we add to contests in the future. There are a few bugs left to iron out in the contest system, so we're holding off releasing it for partners until all the issues are fixed. Keep your eye out though - we'll send out an announcement once the feature is fully ready.

We have some other things in the works, but I think I'll end it here.

A big thanks to BF3k for working hard to develop contests, and to AriaCompany for designs and feedback.

Oh, and happy Thanksgiving if you're in the USA!

 - Aniki