[btilly]

This technique will work for most text, but can be deliberately hacked in a bad way. I discovered this about 20 years ago from a cleverly written attack post on Perlmonks. Every paragraph started with a positive sentence whose tone slid into negative by the end of the paragraph. And then to positive for the next paragraph.

I was horrified at how an attack piece had so many positive votes, and asked people why they were voting for it. It turns out that a lot (probably most) had just skimmed it, felt good, voted for it, and moved on. They literally hadn't seen the nasty things said about a variety of people.

[ryzvonusef]

That's why I specified story books instead of online articles, because with story books, you build a rapport with the author and you have kinda narrowed down the options they will take, on a meta level.

But good point on hacking people's tendency to glide, I shall keep that in mind.