At our university, DC++ was the king. When I started, each dorm room had a 10 Mbit switched port, and each dorm area had a shared 100 Mbit uplink to the university network. So if just 10 people were downloading, you'd instantly overwhelm the uplink. So everyone was instructed to [tag] their username with which dorm they were in, so you'd prioritize people in the same network as yourself for the fastest downloads and so that uni IT could keep a blind eye to us as we weren't killing the uplinks.

(a year or two later, the dorms were disconnected from the university network and connected to an open city fiber network with commercial ISPs with 100 Mbit ports and no uplink contention and DC++ went away as people could now use public BitTorrents)

Before YouTube (and Google video..remember that?), Super Smash Bros Melee players shared matches and combo videos on a DC++ hub. It was THE place to find footage of people pushing the game to its (then) limits.

Another DC++ use that persisted well beyond streaming and torrents was Dtella, the file-sharing network on Purdue dormitory intranet.

DC++ was a superior file sharing app. I used it often. I liked how you could control ratios from individual downloaders or servers.