It’s hard because you don’t want to be overly exclusive of beginners either. In the real world various mechanisms like cost, hiring, applications for membership, referrals can work. But online, unless you’re running a very small community, there’s way too much process and overhead in that, and it comes across as sanctimonious given it’s not standard practice at all.

Honestly I think one of the biggest reasons Reddit fails to work for experts is how voting affects visibility. When the majority of users are beginners, they’ll vote on things that appeal to and are understandable by beginners. Because voting affects the likelihood something gets seen, stuff oriented towards experts doesn’t get as much visibility, so discussion doesn’t happen, and it seems like that content isn’t there. In your example, at least there wasn’t a voting system making it so all the highest ranked questions at your meet up were from absolute beginners.

Somehow HN avoids this but I think it’s because they do both manual curation of bumping/upranking/downranking content and have some heuristic for vote:comment radio deranking posts. Plus low effort posts get banned or hidden.

Without the ranking:voting relationship, like in regular forums where ranking is just based on the last time a thread had a post, beginners would just ignore expert-oriented posts or be ignored if they contributed in a non constructive way. IMO that’s perfectly fine

I think that for many subs the volume would be low enough that voting would be somewhat superfluous if beginner questions would be taken out of the equation: you can just check it once a day (or even once a week) and catch up on it all.

There's some "newsletters" and such which primarily seem to source "the best of Reddit this week", but then you're almost always too late for actual discussion, and the curation also isn't always to my liking.

> it comes across as sanctimonious given it’s not standard practice at all.

I can almost guarantee you that it will on occasion no matter what you do. I've had strangers both email and post GitHub issues asking for help on random stuff that's completely unrelated to any of my projects. I've usually answered some of the more open-ended ones (why people ask me for career advice is beyond me), but I answer the "plz fix my codez" with "no, I don't have time, sorry" and the reply is usually "okay, no problem, thanks for answering" but on a few occasions some gobshite got angry for "not helping the community" or some such nonsense.

It's probably very hard to run a technical $topic-specific community without having an endless stream of beginner questions because the expectation is that's accepted behaviour. This is something where better tooling can help, but e.g. Reddit is pretty ill-suited for it right now.