[Alex3917]

"I wonder if the prior paragraphs where he talks about building his online reputation may have inadvertently primed us to read the sentence that way?"

It's because I wrote this in a hurry so I didn't take as much time to polish the white spacing as I normally would, which makes it more difficult to read. The issue is that there are basically three or four separate ideas that are all chunkified together. I edited that sentence though to at least make it more clear.