Minor nitpick, Direct Connect (DC) was the protocol, DC++ was merely a popular client but by no means the only client. It wasn't even the official client.
Direct Connect really excelled at college campuses. All the traffic was internal so it was blazingly fast plus the hub had a chat feature which is incredibly useful (pre-reddit) and sometimes people would share old tests and stuff.
I'll add that DC is alive and well on my college campus. Beyond speed, it's less likely to get you in trouble with the college + ISP than torrenting, and has some textbooks and other locally relevant content.
Are you serious? Most people on my college campus did not even realize that they could drop their files in the public_html folder to share them online, let alone setup an ADC file sharing program as esoteric as DC++
We had a BulletinBoard based community with FTP sharing, and someone built a crawler to index the servers. So everyone just knew this staic IP which was out campus version of Google.
We then slowly transitioned into DC++ by constantly educating and sharing content on both FTP and DC++
The real shame was that move to DC++ actually caused the BulletinBoard community to die slowly. No more announcement posts, no more requests, no more SuperStar uploaders who “magically” found the latest TV shows aired in the US.
Funny you should mention it...but.... Funny you bring it up, it's been well over a decade since I graduated, but RIT alumni here!
The RIT DC hub was the shit back in the day....
Back in the day there was nothing underground about it, at least for CS students. :) Connecting to the DC hub was a right of passage. So I am speaking from experience. :)
Direct Connect really excelled at college campuses. All the traffic was internal so it was blazingly fast plus the hub had a chat feature which is incredibly useful (pre-reddit) and sometimes people would share old tests and stuff.