h3llx3 - Dailymotion channel with French students laughing and dancing (2008-2009)

h3llx3 is an abandoned Dailymotion channel ran by French students in 2008 and 2009, back when people uploaded unedited home videos for fun.

They published 32 videos, listed at the bottom, mostly unedited footage of french students dancing, laughing, and partying, in classrooms, school hallways, canteens, and basements.

This was before using electronics in schools was banned for students in France (2018), which made it a time capsule from a culture that no longer exists.

28 of the 32 videos were sadly deleted in 2024 as a result of Dailymotion's awful inactivity policy, more details below. The complete list of the videos and screenshots of the channel page prior to the purge are linked at the bottom.

Background

I randomly discovered the channel in the early 2020s, probably while either looking for the song Kat DeLuna - Whine Up, or random numerical file names, which lead me to their classroom dance video (P1040671) that is still available.

Some of the videos (title list at the bottom) appear to be file names generated by their digital camera, which appears to have been a Panasonic Lumix. Unfortunately, as of writing, only four videos are still available. This is a result of the awful inactivity policy that Dailymotion implemented in 2024 with no public notice besides this obscure help center page, so by the time I knew about it, it was already too late.

This is different from the "inactive account policy" they added in 2021 (listed on the same page), where they started purging empty channels older than one year, to prevent them from permanently reserving user names.
This means the other 28 videos were permanently deleted from the Dailymotion database, not just privated or otherwise obscured, so Dailymotion couldn't make them available again, even if we could somehow convince them to. And the policy states that during the three-month grace period, only the account owner could request undeletion of their content anyway.

The other three videos that are still available show them partying and laughing together in a basement, dancing in the school bathroom, and playing around in a classroom.

The reason these videos are historically valuable is that they provide insights into the French student culture of the 2000s. This was before 2018, where the French government banned all electronics use by students in schools, so it was a digital time capsule from a different culture that no longer exists today.

These videos were publicly available for over 15 years. I unfortunately didn't bother archiving them back then, because I was on mobile, making it much more difficult. So I thought to myself, "I'll do it later", and forgot about it, because Dailymotion had a decade-long reputation for stability, so I didn't expect a massive purge in the near future. Dailymotion seemed to be in excellent health.

Had Dailymotion continued to operate like they did from 2005 to 2023, this cultural record would not have been lost. (This is an early hint of what might happen to YouTube.)

Thankfully, I at least took full-page screenshots that are linked at the bottom.

The chance that someone happens to have archived those videos is infinitesimally small, but the reason I am posting this is hoping it will one day be discovered by whoever is behind h3llx3 themselves. They are probably very much alive, and all it takes for them to discover this post is the thought of of looking up their 2008 username eventually. There is a slight chance.

The chronological screenshot at the bottom shows that the final upload was "8 years ago", so the last sign of life is roughly from 2014, or 2015 if the time indicator was rounded upwards. The second-oldest upload and every video after that was from "14 years ago", hence roughly 2008 to 2009. This means the channel owner logged in again after a six-year gap, just to upload one more video.

Perhaps they still have the SD card with those videos laying around. Wherever they are today, I hope they are well. Perhaps they have even started families by now.

Screenshots and video list

At least, I bothered taking two screenshots in 2022, one showing the videos sorted chronologically, and one by view count.

Imgur album, Catbox mirror: chronological, by view count.

I was going to mirror it to pomf2.lain.la for redundancy as well, but it sadly is no longer around. If the links are down, please let me know.

Back in 2022, sorting by views on Dailymotion revealed the view counter on the channel page, making it visible on the second screenshot. The most viewed video, "Bonjour Cauet =D", had 1.4K views, where as the least viewed one, "P1060375", which also happens to be the most recent, had 20 views.

Chronological title list (newest to oldest) with my interpretations added: