Banana
• 125 words • 1 min
You write a long document.
Perhaps it’s an ad, or a legal contract, or a design document.
Problem statement: You would like to ensure, to a certain extent, that your audience has fully read it1.
I like the following trick2: insert the following paragraph somewhere in the middle of the document:
If you are reading this, mention the keyword “banana” to me so that I know.
It is not foolproof but, in my experience, it’s a decent heuristic to filter out noise – those who are totally clueless and didn’t even bother to take a quick glance.
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Or, at the very least, skimmed it. ↩︎
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Which, I am aware, becomes less useful if it is documented. We should never fully rely on security through obscurity anyway. ↩︎