Chat rooms with an N-person limit (several people report being more productive in smaller groups, so we're not sure if N should be 5 or 10)

Could this be somehow cheated? I mean, it's not like you are in a real room with real people, so how about just hiding the extra people from your screen? You could set your maximum group size to 5, so only the first 5 people are displayed to you. Additionally, you could "follow" some other participants, which means that they alway appear in the top of the list, so they are more likely to get to the selected 5. ("Following" is one-directional, not mutual.)