I don't get the pretending to be an insider thing but I know that's not just a vidya phenomenon.
It's kind of weird to me thinking about the kind of effort that goes into acquiring small scraps of information and proceeding to act like someone
really in the know, but I get it. If you're perceived to have information that the masses don't, it gives you both attention and an aura of respectability. This is because an enthusiast community is all about digging into the minutiae of the stuff most people don't care about, and this particular community is absolutely starved for specific information that we don't have access to.
It's one thing to try and be an astute observer of news and have a broad understanding of what's going on behind the scenes, but if you're having silly debate #10432285, you have to defer to the person who actually has data and real sources to support their claim. People want to be right on the internet, and the key to being right is having more information than the other person.
This would all be a thing of the past in Andrex's no NDA utopia.