I don't know if I can descrigbe my meme spreading endevaours as "introduced" about my meme spreading endeavors, more like occasionally name dropping when discussing things like politics (craziness), technological progress, the scientific method, evolution, logic or space travel.
I don't think I'm actually making a difference, the activation energies appear to be too high, the "best" result I have to show is my best friend having a temporary affective death spiral around my beliefs (which are heavily LW influenced), he reverted later, I don't think I really made him rational in any real way (even during the height of the death spiral I didn't think he was really becoming more rational, the death spiral was just that, a death spiral not founded on reasoned thought).
I've actually had difficulty even having a discussion with my GF on this (because of the number of cached thoughts from LW that I've assimilated and the added difficulty of translating the memes on the fly from English) after she expressed skepticism about human minds being implementable (to my best estimate she expressed concerns about the feasibility of measurement) in a different medium as well as her aversion to cryonics (which mostly boiled down to "I would be too lonley" and "why do you want to spend an eternity without me?").
I've been lurking on LW since shortly after it started, and on OB for about six months before that. In that time, I've told four or five people about it. I would make a terrible evangelist.
I'm curious as to whether other people have the same problem. I'd like to tell lots of people about LW, but I don't think they're ready for it. If they read a statement like "purchase utilons and warm fuzzies separately" their eyes would glaze over, and they'd walk away thinking LW was some sort of crackpot site.
I have found certain posts and topics to be fairly good hooks for getting people interested. An Alien God is a good suggested read for people with an interest in evolutionary theory and the Cthulhu mythos (surprisingly high crossover in my experience). HP:MoR is also a pretty popular hook. The site itself isn't really optimised for word-of-mouth, though, and not everyone likes child wizards and blasphemous horrors.
How many people have you introduced to LW? Who were they, how do you do it and what was their reaction? How could we do it better?