Do conspiracy theories perhaps explain people's life experience in a more satisfactory way than anything else they’ve heard, or been able to articulate on their own?  

It would certainly seem to fulfill such a function for people with a lot of stored-up feelings of rejection and dismissal—a sense that the world considers them insignificant.  And it would be doubly magnetic if they feared that frankly giving vent to these feelings would only bring further humiliation.  After all, “I’m a nobody” and “I’m left out of all the important decisions and actions” say pretty much the same thing.  The latter is just a lot more palatable.

As for the exhortation to immediately begin to “Do your own research,” it can trigger a similarly powerful emotional reaction.  With the first step in this direction, the new recruit is able to make the psychological transition from being a mere passive victim to an active survivor—and a vengeful one at that, who is already on the path to bringing down his longtime malefactors.

Also, after concocting or latching onto just a few alternative ways of viewing what’s going on around us, people can begin to say to themselves, “I have uncommon knowledge and insight that make me more than just one of the sheep” (i.e., the nobodies—the people who almost everybody in the world is presumed to be).  In doing so, the newbie can go from being a nobody to a revolutionary, engaged in a heroic struggle to overthrow the entire rotten, corrupt, elitist (read “exclusionary to people like me”) current power structure.  

In addition to adopting the romantic persona of the revolutionary, a convert to a QAnon-type group can also gain a considerable sense of solidarity, appreciation and support from his or her online compatriots for every contribution made to the collective cause.

It’s therefore almost to be expected that many people with time on their hands will be drawn in so thoroughly by the undertow of cyber-sleuthing out new conspiracy theories that they can soon talk about little else.  It will also come as news to no one that their real-world family and friends are often put off by their agitated new one-track chatter, and relationships can be strained to the breaking point.  

The net effect is that instead of directly cutting off their members’ contact with friends and family, as abusive religiously-themed cults often do, mainstream information-rejecting groups can simply rely on their newbies to create these ruptures themselves, on their own initiative.

How will the people who are caught up in today’s knowledge-denying groups ever escape their gravitational pull?  In response to the cults of fifty years ago, a skill called de-programming arose, and its practitioners were able to eventually conduct a fair number of rescues.  But the de-programmers were often engaged by the parents of victims under 21, who had certain legal rights—and if they were lucky, also the financial wherewithal to support their efforts.  Who will care enough and/or have the means to rescue the victims of the mind-controlling cults of our present age?