How and when did you start reading Homestuck?

I found people talking about this thing called Homestuck and saw a few videos about it, and given my minimal knowledge of it (including looking at Know Your Meme's page on the comic) I thought it was a whole load of weird nonsense.

Eventually I knew a bit about Homestuck and occasionally used pictures from it as reaction gifs. Also this one forum had a fair amount of users who read Homestuck and encouraged me to read it as well. Eventually, while googling Homestuck reaction gifs, I figured, maybe I should read Homestuck, why the hell not.

So I read the comic. I mostly skimmed everything, which is of course a deadly sin because I didn't understand anything. I caught up a month before the Gigapause ended, and at a point during the A6A6I4 updates I decided to re-read the comic, mostly not skimming everything but still not getting everything.

Eventually I became more and more invested in the comic and joined the MSPA forums a year ago, and also started looking at the subreddit. So here I am.

I first heard of Homestuck in 2011, when I complimented a friend on his broken record Dave shirt (the one with the long red sleeves) and he asked me if I read Homestuck. I said no, so he recommended it to me, and once I had some free time that summer I finally did. I got caught up during the Scratch intermission around the time that Vriska was killed by Terezi (so my first introduction to the fandom was during the controversy over Vriska's god tier clock ruling) Much later, I would realize that I had technically been introduced to MSPA in around 2008 while Problem Sleuth was going on, but at the time I didn't really understand the format so I abandoned it after a few pages.

I first heard of Homestuck from the PBS Idea Channel episode in 2012, and intermittently from High School friends throughout 2012-2014, but I only actually started reading when a friend recommended it to me on March 4th, 2015 and caught up on July 9th, 2015 with the "Tavros did a good thing" update.

I heard about MSPA, especially Problem Sleuth from the starmen.net forums and/or tv tropes, and went to the site and read all the stories in order over the course of however many months. I got through Jailbreak and Bard Quest okay, took a break halfway through Problem Sleuth because I was getting kind of tired of it, then finished that when I wanted to see what this fourth, interesting-looking "Homestuck" story was about. I didn't barely know anything about it, but found a couple peeks of what was waiting for me, not that I understood any of it. Of course that took me a week to catch up on when I got hooked around Act 2, catching up in the scratch intermission when he was talking about the Sufferer. I have been an avid follower since then. Though I didn't start participating in the forums until the gigapause.

It was during a minor TV Tropes binge, that I found the trope Audience-Alienating Premise, which is about ideas (good or bad) that can scare away some people.
The trope has an entry for Homestuck, which points out the "LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT HOMESTUCK" meme, and that fully appreciating this webcomic can take some effort, such as reading other MSPA works first.
Based on that incomplete information, I thought that probably Homestuck could be the excellent execution of an idea that not everyone would like - but that I probably would.
I took that as a challenge to the webcomic, and to my ability to appreciate it.
Homestuck did pass the challenge, and I am reading it since.
That much about the How. The When was sometime during the Gigapause - I know, that does not fix the date with any high degree of accuracy ;-)

I myself never thought Homestuck was an anime though I can see why people would think that. I've myself jokingly called Homestuck a weird anime because so many people think it is one.

I became aware of it from TVTropes, specifically the BGMOverride page, I was curious to see what kind of webcomic managed to get a listing on a page about videogame music, so I visited the TVTropes page and went to the comic from there, and then I started reading MSPA from the beginning after reading the new reader's page.

I caught up at about the 2xTrap I think.

I used to follow Mark Oshiro's 'Mark Reads' series of liveblogs, and people kept comparing book characters to Homestuck characters. (Usually Karkat.) Mark got a million requests from people to read Homestuck, which I found annoying. I looked it up and thought it looked like kiddie stuff, but I also wondered what made it worth so many recommendations. Then another adult blogger I looked up to mentioned that she enjoyed Homestuck, and I was sold. I read the whole comic up to that point in the space of four days, then read it again a few months later at a more reasonable pace. I've been fairly obsessed ever since.

Was introduced to Problem Sleuth by one of my friends when I was in highschool. It had finished by the time I started reading and Homestuck was literally just starting. At the time I was not the kind of person to read fan reactions or really talk about things online, so I had no concept of the maelstrom of a fandom that was brewing at the time. I was also not the sort of person to check publication dates, so I had no concept of how fast Problem Sleuth had been made.
I thought it was a funny cool story, and reread it after I had finished, though it was to silly for me to get majorly invested in it like I might for a world with serious world building. I gave his other stuff a look, and found homestuck. Act 1 was not even halfway finished at the time and I thought it looked boring, besides, I knew how long webcomics took to update so I didn't want to follow it.

And that was the last I thought of MSPA for YEARS.

I found homestuck again when I decided on a complete whim to read Problem Sleuth one more time and then noticed that other webcomic he had been working on had gotten a little bit longer since last I checked...

The Beta Kids were just arriving and meeting the Condesce. I missed nearly all of homestuck only to find it in its finnal few years, still kinda salty about it, since I have become so invested since.

I started reading Homestuck Proper on 4/12/13 since I distinctly remember lazly scrolling over to the homestuck log and clicking on the newest entry to see how far things had progressed. I remember seeing this page www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=008130 and just thinking, "what the hell, oh no it got weird."

Like apparently a lot of people I hear about it through TVTropes. I started reading Homestuck and got a few pages until I decided to do Jailbreak instead, because based on John's introduction page I assumed it would be a story about his attempts to become a stage magician. Also, because I thought for some reason it was a genuine CYOA with a branching story and I didn't have time for that. So I went back to Jailbreak and tried to read chronologically. At some point I accidentally clicked on the link to the latest page, which had some grey people kissing. I figured Homestuck must have ended and another comic started. Unfortunately while reading Problem Sleuth I took to the wiki to understand the events a little better and ended up very spoiled on Homestuck. It was definitely a big regret that up through the end of Hivebent nothing was a surprise to me.