It’s not elitism, it’s just self defense. Every forum starts out with high–value high–signal low–noise conversations and gradually decays towards low–signal high–noise conversations as new people are brought in. The new people are, by definition, new. They don’t know much if anything yet so they cannot participate meaningfully in advanced topics. Naturally they ask questions in order to fill in the gaps in their knowledge. It is simply unfortunate that the effect is to increase the amount of noise in the forum as each new member asks the same questions over and over again. This leads to the most knowledgeable members of the forum dropping out, as the quality of the discussion drops below the point where it is worth their time.

See also “Eternal September”.