I've been interested in the two-party system and Duverger's "law" since witnessing the spoiler effect in the 2000 US election.

I'm not sure when I first heard about specific voting method reforms, but CGP Grey's 2011 videos about FPTP and IRV in the animal kingdom are likely culprits. I was intrigued, and started donating to FairVote and advocating online for "preferential voting" (of unspecified type, as I only had a vague understanding of the details) from around 2013.

While Maine was considering the adoption of IRV for state-wide elections in 2016, I talked to a lot of people online who were for or against it.

Most of the people who were against IRV were idiots, who thought that it violated "one person one vote" by giving voters "participation trophies" if they didn't win in the first round, or who didn't "want my election decided by no algorithm".

But a few IRV opponents were smart, and opposed it for the opposite reason: It didn't work well enough, and didn't actually fix the problems it was claimed to.

While trying to convince them otherwise, I learned a lot more about social choice theory, the different variants of "ranked-choice voting", and IRV in particular, and changed my mind. I stopped donating to FairVote in 2017, and started advocating for better single-winner reforms like STAR Voting, Condorcet ranked-choice voting, Approval, Balanced Approval, and Score Voting, as well as Proportional Representation for multi-winner legislatures.