I remember something similar about companies too. When you have product market fit, customers will sear you when your product doesn't work. If you don't, you'll never hear from them again.
It's just all around incredibly unpleasant. I loved Quora in its early years when it was invitation only, but I don't ever want to have anything to do with it again.
I think the point about shamelessly pretending to understand, though, is a subtler question, and difficult to address. I follow people on a lot of topics I don't know about, and I've occasionally discovered later down the line than they're full of crap. And I realise in retrospect that I've helped them do it, upvoting seemingly well-researched answers because I appreciated the effort.
It really highlights the difficulty of figuring out who to trust when there's no central authority, and I could see myself being drawn into some reality-denying group a la flat-earthers or antivaxxers just because I happened to follow the wrong people at the start, and on their advice reject other answers.
Which will lead most people passing by to consider that the topic is mostly driven from the point of view of this minority.
This is why we hear a lot about the SJW, anti-vax, the flat earther and so on these days: they make a lot of noise online, even if IRL we never see them because there are so few of them.
This is also why we can see extreme political point of views rising, because people are embolden to join in, reading mass of unchallenged content, pandering to their fear. IRL, they may not, it would not be socially acceptable and the barrier to entry would be bigger.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/632474-i-have-a-foreboding-...
https://github.com/prettydiff/wisdom/blob/master/Avoiding_Tr...
"People who provide challenging opinions are not trolling so long as they are not deviating from the conversation at hand. There are some people whose only goal is to attain emotional harmony. When a challenging opinion is encountered it is easy for some people to view this disruption to the social norm as trolling, when it likely isn't."
"Some people are easily offended. When a person engages in a conversation directly without distraction they aren't trolling simply because you became emotional."