That's unfortunate that it was the experience you had. It's your art/vision you have the right to display it however you please. I don't know why people are so mean there.
Don't get me wrong I like starting a dumpster fires over there like anyone else but trashing someone's art is pretty low and you are right, it's not a contest.
I feel bad for some of the users sometimes, in the groups some enter and apologize for their lack of skills or amateurish photos...they shouldn't feel the need unfortunate some one made them feel like they had to feel low about themselves. It's all about the sharing of memories and skills are developed with practice overtime.
I have seen the similar comments (by multiple elitists) before on FB. Some of these UX photographers like to see regular images with no filtering and are too bigoted to accept anything else.
I can't be bothered with FB anymore. I deliberately post my content late there and the following is building but it's little effort. I use it to entice people here, but it rarely works! Here means work and people don't like to work.
There, they can dump their content and wait for responses. That doesn't work here unless you have a large following.
You are right, it doesn't get people here, at least I haven't had any luck. I post my link to here and I don't even think they open it, they just look at the photos posted with it but I do it anyway because why not. I think it was easier to build a following here than fb. I don't put much effort tho, post when I want sometimes I don't post for months and change all my settings to inactive. I don't take social media too seriously overall, I never had intentions on being famous, I just want to have fun. Some of the groups I'm part of, still took a lot of filtering thru...too many micromanaging dumb rules. The smaller local ones are better I find...like 5k or less. They are probably just happy someone wants to be part of their group! I agree that the ones run by bigger name photographers are pretty douchy most of the time. Probably makes them feel more important when they tear someone's passion apart. Screw em, keep doing your thing!