Most communities like this develop some (lot of?) elitism, but if you are in the in-group — or early — it can be very rewarding.
My online hacker community time was well before SO (forums even before phpBB, IRC, mailing lists, free software on their self-hosted infra like Gnome, FreeDesktop etc), but you could see the same patterns always (even if you go through usenet group archives or BBS archives).
The beauty of online is that you could always find a community to be in-group of (sounds like a lot of that is happening on Discord these days, but I do not have an account really).
Similarly, you can see that on HN too (passing comments on "green usernames" etc), but it feels like both in-group self-moderation (with flagging and downvotes) and active moderation by dang and co at least keeps it low profile.