Is there a difference between this and snobbery?

I think it's a bit more subtle than just "other people like what I like ew" - it's more a sensation of "because this person likes what I like they can presume some kinship/fellow-feeling with me" i.e. not so much a denial that you have things in common with people but a denial that the notion of having things in common means anything beyond a coincidence of taste.

I like what Nitsuh's saying, too.

when was the first time you encountered 'snobbery'?

i'm sure i'd experienced snobbery before, but this really stuck w/ me:

in 1985, i had a pair of new, black & red AJ1s that i was really excited about. i'd had to beg for weeks before my mom would finally spring, $70 or w/e seeming a ridiculous sum to pay for sneakers. i remember wearing them when i went to visit these rich cousins of mine. they tended to dress all prep. h***, the oldest of us and leader of the pack, took one look at me and sneered. "you trying to look like a little black boy?" everyone laughed. didn't make me feel any different about the shoes (awesome), but i've never completely forgiven him.

People who mispronounce the name Alex as "Alec" are disgusting savages

when i was in infant school, everyone loved He-Man and Masters of the Universe. It was a pan-classroom obsession, especially among the boys in the class. If we weren't role-playing He-Man in the playground, we were watching the TV show at home or collecting the toys. Pretty much all anyone talked about. Then one day in the upper infants' class I came into school just a little late, sat at a table with the other boys and started talking about He-Man stuff, only to be met by sneers and laughter. He-Man, I was informed, is for babies. He's not real, he's a drawing on a piece of paper and a piece of paper can't fight baddies. Also the figurines are dolls, and dolls are for girls.
That was it - He-Man was no longer cool, and that was my first brush with the concept of 'cool' or the concept of 'not cool'. I must have also been about 5 or 6. This universal realisation on behalf of my classmates didn't stop them all getting into ThunderCats, Pole Position, Visionaries and (quite a bit later) Teenage Turtles and all manner of doll-based, paper-based heroes.

Heh, my first encounter with snobbery came from my cousins too. They were a few years older than me and every year when we'd make the family car trek up to Michigan to visit them, they'd just kill me about the music I listened to.

It first started when I was maybe 4 or 5 in the early 80s. I asked my cousin C____ if he wanted to listen to music with me. We looked through the tapes we had brought and didn't find anything satisfactory - it was mostly kids tapes and oldies stuff like the Beatles and CCR. He asked me if we had any breakin' music, so I went to asked my mom. She said "no, but we've got some quackin' music!"

(this album):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LveIQZBmlqI

The look of withering scorn he gave me when I reported this answer back to him was worthy of the most jaded hipster record store clerk and set the scene for similar interactions in future years. Why was I still listening to breakin' music when I should be listening to Motley Crue and Cinderella? Why was I still listening to Cinderella haven't you heard of Metallica? Why was I still listening to Metallica the Dead Milkmen are what's cool?

In the first year of high school, our music teacher suggested the whole class would come with her and see an opera at the Finnish National Opera. I was really against the idea, because coming from a working class background, my idea of opera at that point was that it was incomprehensible art for poshly dressed upper class people. In the end she managed to convince me to come, though. I even tried to wear my best clothes, which at that time meant a neutral-coloured wool sweater and clean black jeans. The opera (or operetta, to be precise) in question was Strauss's Die Fledermaus, which is quite funny and entertaining, so after the first half I was ready to scrap my prejudices against the opera... But during the intermission the teacher came to me and scolded me for having eaten sweets during the show!

Like the boor that I was, I'd thought it'd be perfectly fine to bring a bag of sweets to the opera, and the teacher had seen me eat them. And it was not like they made any noise or anything, I'd picked only sweets without a wrapper, and they were in a plastic bag. But apparently to her, the mere idea of eating sweets in the opera was unacceptable! I felt a bit ashamed, but mostly just angered, by her reaction. Way to convince an opera sceptic, teacher!

(The postscript to this story happened years later, when me and some friends went to see The Magic Flute in the Czech National Opera, and I noticed that during the intermission, alongside the posh wines and tarts, they were also selling Mentos! By then it'd been ages since I graduated from high school, but I felt like taking a photo of the Mentos on sale, finding that music teacher's address, and mailing the pic to her, with a note saying, "SEE?".)

13-15 year olds are terrific snobs, but instead of opera or French cooking they are snobbish about the things that only 13-15 year olds care about.

the first time i can remember was after having joined prep school and some kids were discussing their visit to the house of another kid who was from a lower middle class 'model minority' type of south asian family whose parents were probably making a sacrifice to send their son to the school and were significantly less well-to-do than everyone else

they were laughing at how small and shitty his house was in a way that seemed extraordinarily caustic and unashamed, it was a useful education in the attitudes of the place

A lot of these seem like inversions of the situation described in first post of this thread

In my early teens i knocked about with an upper middle class kid called Edwin who confessed to me his mother had referred to me as "coming from that appalling Irish family" when telling him to stay clear of me. Also when I switched schools years before this, I was ashamed to admit I came from Deighton and used to answer evasively if somebody asked where I lived - constantly trying to change Deighton into south Fixby or west Bradley.