It’s more frustration than elitism. Take the topic of Machine Learning for example, there’s really few people on planet earth that can discuss the implications of it in detail. To broaden membership into that discussion, you have to provide a lifeline in the context of ‘what are the implications of AI with respect to future work, will humanity ever have to work again?’ - ok, now most people can take part.

The frustration is, why is gossip and conspiracy lifelines necessary for topics that most people should have no issue discussing? You really can’t add anything without that stuff?

Anyways, I heard Hunter Biden is a drug addict, and Putin has cancer, and that’s why he’s invading Ukraine.

Exactly. We elect people not ideas.

Ironically, your comment is itself a perfect example of discussing an idea. In fact, I would argue that discussing people and events as proxies for the discussion of ideas does not fall foul of the maxim.

One thing is to discuss how candidate X chooses to dress, whether candidate Y cheated on their partner, or how candidate Z looked so stupid in that incident yesterday. Another very different thing is to discuss candidate X's personal background (and how it makes them more likely to understand a given issue), that candidate Y does not practice what they preach (and probably cannot be trusted), or that candidate Z has owned up to their screw-up yesterday (and self-criticism is a good trait for leadership).

Also, whether one likes Reddit or not, it has a huge userbase, and each subreddit is pretty much different than another. There are plenty of subreddits with really interesting comment chains.