FanFiction.net

FanFiction.net was created in 1998 by Xing Li, a software developer from Alhambra, California, and launched on October 15 of that year as a repository for fan-created stories. It arrived at the perfect moment: Harry Potter, Pokémon, Buffy, and anime fandoms were flooding onto the early web, and suddenly there was one enormous, searchable place to put the stories — nearly 100,000 of them by 2001. By 2002 the site had 118,000 registered users, roughly a third of them 18 or younger and 80 percent of them female — a creative-writing workshop of unprecedented scale, run by and for teenage girls, years before anyone thought to take that seriously.

The culture was instantly recognizable to anyone who lived it: the legal disclaimer dutifully pasted atop every chapter ("I don't own Naruto, please don't sue me"), the author's notes, the plea for readers to "R&R" — read and review. It was also a culture that survived its moderation dramas, most famously in September 2002, when the site banned NC-17 content outright and purged it a month later, scattering the mature-rated diaspora to other archives.

The numbers it accumulated remain staggering. Harry Potter alone amassed some 850,000 stories, with Naruto and Twilight in the hundreds of thousands; the site's registered users eventually passed 12 million; and it hosts a Super Smash Bros. epic exceeding 30 million words — a claimant to the longest work of fiction ever written. Newer platforms long ago took the crowds, and the aging site is part digital ruin now — but an entire generation of professional novelists, screenwriters, and editors did their first hundred thousand words there, one disclaimer at a time.