Gatekeeping actually does work. You train people how to treat you. If you accept people behaving ignorantly, wasting other people’s time, taking zero effort to help themselves, being rude then they will continually do so. For instance see the folks who think the open source community is a free call center full of support agents instead of other users. If they get a negative response to being an asshole they on average don’t stick around or they change their tack. If supported and babied they will continue their behavior. The general public is on average not entirely irrational. Most wont keep touching the stove. More generally open source communities are rarely getting per user revenue. More realistically every user who doesn’t know anything and needs their hand held because they aren’t actually interested in learning anything is an unrecoverable cost which could sap the energy of the community and destroy it.

Consumers are used to a customer/company relationship