Twenty-five years ago today on November 21 1998, we registered the domain Literotica.com. Unbeknownst to us, it was the start of a journey that has defined our lives. If we'd have known then that billions of people around the world would visit the small HTML website we were working on, we may have been too intimated to launch it. As avid readers, we believed that the late 1990s web needed a modern alternative to the aging alt.sex.stories Usenet group. Our modest goals at the time were to improve the reading and story discovery experience, to give authors a place they'd be proud to call home, and to offer human moderation and safety (no popups, spyware, etc.) as an alternative to Usenet's increasing anarchy.
It didn't take long after Literotica's launch for us to realize that we were in over our heads. Almost immediately, we were kicked off our web host for "too many hits". Suggestions and feedback from readers and authors was overwhelming. HTML alone did not have the capabilities needed to build the features visitors were asking for. We weren't yet familiar with PHP, so we went to work learning PERL/CGI. The new requested features rolled out monthly while publishing formats like Erotic Audio and Interactive Stories were added (back when those required emerging technologies to implement). We survived the Dot-com bubble (turning down all offers to buy the site) and continued to grow into the early 2000s.
By the 2010s, Literotica had come into its own as the web's largest and most awesome community of erotica authors and readers. With the start of the smartphone era, we worked to make the site easy to use on mobile devices while continuing to roll out new features based on user feedback, just as we did back in 1998.
