So, back some time around 2005 or so, a friend turned me on to RSS readers as a way to keep up with interesting stuff on the web. And so I fired up an account and loaded up some times I knew I liked, and then took a look at their list of 'most read' blogs. MeFi was listed. I had heard of it before but only looked at a few posts. I started reading it and was hooked. So I eventually paid my money in mid 2006 and started commenting. Some time in the next year, I started reading AskMe as well. I've been hooked ever since.
Oh, yeah, these are totally my people.
I forget what did it, but realizing that, oh, yeah, these are totally my people -- and with an awesome signal/noise ratio, too. And so I started recruiting cool people, too. :)