One of the most underappreciated things about posting on the internet is that the most factual treatment gets the best response

Lol. They have strong feelings about what they type, they want to emphasize the strength of their feelings, and they believe ALL CAPS is SHOUTING ONLINE. No mental derangement required.

I think that, in left-wing spaces, profanity fills a similar need. It shows you care so much about your topic that you can’t or won’t follow traditional rules of civility, that you aren’t being polished and professional but you’re speaking from the heart about how you really feel instead. Conservatives think using profanity makes you look bad (they don’t consider racial slurs profane, of course) so they inject emotion into their text in other ways. Eg CAPS LOCK.

I was looking for people who were at that point of being educated about a cause, but weighed it it less then those benefits of popularity and continued on in the capitalist consumerist system. Then maybe something else pushed those scales to the other side and they chose to join the cause. What was that experience? Was it having a child? Was it an experience with death, spiritual experience, revelation, drug trip, etc. I guess that’s the question.

I think education about a cause is a continuum, not a binary. When I changed from popular lifeways to less popular ones, it wasn’t because of a road to Damascus moment that made me suddenly change my mind. It was because, as I gradually learned more about a particular topic, I ultimately reached tipping point and decided the perceived benefits of switching to the less popular option outweighed the benefits of sticking with the popular option.

(And I’m using benefits in the broadest sense - being able to feel good about myself for doing the right thing is a benefit that outweighs mere physical or financial gain in a lot of cases.)

The other major factor in my switching, when I think back on it, was the capitalist alternative getting worse. I quit using Google’s search engine, for example, both because I learned more about online privacy and because Google’s searches were providing increasingly shitty results.

All the things you list are things people choose for other reasons than just “winning”.

People choose to be socialists because it’s morally right, not because it’s popular.

People choose Linux and open source software because it benefits them, not because it’s popular.

People choose veganism because it’s morally right and it benefits them, not because it’s popular.

When you say capitalist options offer “a better value” - that’s where you’re making a mistake. These alternatives do benefit people, individually, no matter how few other people join in. And that’s why people join them.

So if you want to motivate people to join a movement, show how it’ll benefit them to join - physically, emotionally, financially, or spiritually.