From experience: the "News2" thing does work. The only problem is that after a few "NewsN" iterations, you come to realize that you're just basically kicking out everyone except for the same few core groups of users each time you make a new one, so you might as well just have the single site with the core users and lock it down.
Interesting; may I ask what was the example of 'News2' working?
Regarding the exclusivity of the core group of users, I understand that would tend to be the outcome. But I think the 'forking' method would be a little more dynamic than just locking down the user list. It would allow new, high quality users to come on board, if they really wanted to.
I realize how 'classist' this sounds, and it makes me a bit uncomfortable. But as we all know, good things came come out of dwelling on uncomfortable topics.
