Your point about breaking the rules to become successful is an old, old trick by community managers. I knew an awful lot of large forums that originally took o

Your point about breaking the rules to become successful is an old, old trick by community managers. I knew an awful lot of large forums that originally took off by posting ROMs/torrents/music/film downloads and then carefully excised them when the site had tens of thousands of members and might actually be visible to the copyright owners. It's a pretty good way to become large rather quickly, since illegal or legal questionable content brings in a lot of visitors. Then you just remove it, and watch the network effect/inflated stats lure people to your site. "IIRC pg wrote an essay defending that concept, more-or-less (and where by "I", he meant "startups"). " I also heard it mentioned as 'asking for forgiveness rather than permission'. Or more cynically, get big enough that you can afford to fight the inevitable lawsuits.