I learned about it from my professor because I was interested in tracking the occurrence of Golden Oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus citrinopileatus, in my area. It’s a really great tool.
If all goes well (i.e. I get enough participation) I’ll be leading a class called “Forest Walk with iNaturalist” in Iowa City in July. Basically to walk around in the woods and show people how to use the app. Excited for that!
seems like this could be a question asked as part of the iNaturalist signup process, if that’s not already the case
That’s the exact same article that led me to iNat. I remember being especially excited about the prospect of using it to discover undescribed species, although so far no confirmed discoveries for me but it is always possible one of my needs IDs qualifies and I just don’t know it.
I remember quite clearly how I first got into iNat. The story goes way back a few years ago when I found a dead butterfly in a workshop, which I took back home and just left it at my desk. Fast forward a few months when I was on a hike, I saw several more butterflies fluttering about and hilltopping, which got me curious on what other species I could possibly find, which got me wondering what species the dead butterfly on my desk was. So after some google searching, I came across iNat, and well here I am, a currently active user. I have always been interested in wildlife ever since I was a child, but I think iNat kind of rekindled and accelerated that interest, so thats pretty cool.
A guy, who I cant remember, went to my University, in Chile, and talked about iNat
Sigh. I could probably stand in a 80-acre wood of un-blighted American chestnuts while listening to the sounds of a passenger pigeon overhead and have no idea anything was out of the ordinary, so I doubt I’m going to make the next great find. 
But, I liked that part of the article too.
That’s one reason I’ll add any weird thing I don’t recognize if it seems like an id can be made from the photo…
For me I chose iNat as a method to enter my findings for National Moth Week and soon came to realize it was so much more…
I wanted to find out what kind of turtle I had seen in a local park. I googled. I found a few pictures that were on iNat. I figured I could confirm what I thought it was this way, and I did. Started posting my other pictures. Got responses. Started going out looking for more. 
I’d seen the name come up several times when looking for photos of species but never looked into it. It wasn’t until I was bored one day and looking for a nature or wildlife app that I saw iNaturalist come up. Since I recognized the name, I read up on it, joined, and have been hooked ever since wishing I had known about it much longer ago. Changed my life for the better engaging in identification games and memorizing taxonomy again like I used to do when I was barely a teenager
Same for me, I think. I’ve always been interested in nature and in particular the sheer diversity of different things there are to see. I’d been looking for a system to keep track of my life list, of sorts, and I’d played around with Project Noah about six years ago. Fast forward and I found iNat via the article, and I’ve pretty much been addicted ever since.
“Other”: I believe I first learned about iNat from a talk by Scott Loarie at San Francisco State University, circa 2009-2010.
As far as I can remember I heard about iNaturalist from @gyrrlfalcon.
I was already kinda doing something on my own like INat
Since I was 7-8 I use to catch snakes and lizards and take pictures and write
Down when where and how I found them I grew while I was in college
I spent a summer doing land surveyor stuff and found some petrified saguaro
Cactus ribs about 50 miles north of were they should have been so it grew some more
And then my daughter while going to UofA and a old friend were begging me to join
Because she needed help with her thesis on cacti my old friend because he thought
I was lost after spending two years being hospitalized for some serious injuries I had
My daughter told me about this in 2014 my friend in early 2016 I’ve been here since mid 2016 long story short it’s been a life saver for me
I don’t remember which of us found it first. We kept exchanging finds for things like this back and forth.
I had been uploading photos to Wikimedia commons for a few years to illustrate Wikipedia articles that were lacking species that I knew locally. But it was always difficult to find identifications for other things that I came across. Eg I photographed a fly and two years later narrowed it down to being a tachinid. I came across a small paragraph in the NZ Royal Forest & Bird magazine that mentioned NatureWatch.org.nz (which was using a copy of the iNat software, they’ve since moved their whole separate database onto iNat) - I posted an observation there and had an ID back within 1 minute - identifying life was never the same again …
From my profile page on iNat:
We have a considerable field guide library and over the years I’ve used them joyfully. Last year, I joked, “I wish there was an ‘e-praying mantis’” since I am somewhat of an equal-opportunity amateur (aspiring) naturalist and while ebird is a lovely daily habit, who can I excitedly share my bizarrely large cadre of Chinese mantis friends with? What about this slime mold? The 27 woolly bears I saw? Cue: iNaturalist!
I don’t like the labels too much (I’m a birder, I’m a whatever-er) but the truth is I was really mainly focused on collecting bird data because the natural history society I belonged to was trying to get us submitting checklists but I am always looking at everything and photographing everything I come across. I still use eBird basically every day, multiple times a day, but I’m mainly :owlfull-on in love with iNat every day and now the thinking is more, “Gosh, I wish eBird was more like iNat…it’s soooo one-sided and I can’t add photos through the app and blahh blaah blah.” Funny.
I think I searched the app store or googled. 
My current girlfriend told me about it on our first date! And now I’m probably more addicted than she is.
Haha I can’t get my wife to use it because she says anything she saw I’d just add anyway.
It’s been long enough that I’m not entirely sure, but I think it was through searching for an app. I’d talked with friends before about the idea of having an app that does speech-to-text to speed up making plant lists during botanical trips, and I played a little with LeafSnap on an old iPad. That app sort of fizzled when the initial grant ran out, and I was looking for other nature ID apps, and I think that was when I stumbled across iNaturalist.