I've been a reader and lurker on skeptical forums for a long time, about 10 or 12 years.
I was a very frequent reader of the JREF forum, never had the inclination to post there but I learned a lot about skepticism from reading their threads. I also frequented forums and blogs about religion, atheism, creationism and evolution.
My first glimpse of ElevatorGate was on the JREF, where I found out the original story, the continuing saga and the opinions of several of the posters.
At the same time, I used to read Pharyngula from time to time and I noticed how the "feminist" ideology was permeating every post.
When PZ posted this
comic, describing it as reality, I got tired of it and started doing some searches about this male privilege thing, and reading blogs that discussed this concept.
After that, somehow I ended up at Tfoot's blog, and followed him on twitter, and then I started reading his posts about the skepchicks and Hall's T-shirt and the rest of stuff and following people he retweeted, and somehow I ended up at Scented Nectar's blog, and then I followed her link to the pit and read the whole thread.
Why am I interested on the pit and why am I posting here?
I like skepticism. I don't have a blog, a youtube channel and I don't tweet, so I'm mainly a non-entity, but I like skepticism, and learning about skepticism and logical and critical thought has been a part of my life for a long time. I like Randi's ideas, I like Sagan's ideas, and I like the ideas of several posters and bloggers in these so called "community", so reading all these people calling themselves skeptics but not behaving like one was pretty jarring to me.
But I also approach this from the gender angle, since reading and learning about all this has also brought me to being interested in gender issues, egalitarianism and men's issues, which is something I never thought about before, and FTB, A+ and the skepchicks have several views on feminism, equality and men/women relationships I find invalid and even sometimes offensive.
For these two reasons, I find countering the FTB rethoric important, maybe not in a real life context, but in a cyber-space, intellectual context.
I also enjoy the lulz aspect of the pit, the community feeling and the fact that between the lulz and the satire there are interesting conversations, topics and ideas.