I think the first sentence

> A while back, a digital acquaintance of mine went to work for the company Zora, which made me aware of its existence and curious about its purpose.

should be a pretty big hint that the article does not presuppose that the reader knows about Zora. But if you don't know what bl—ch— in the third paragraph refers to, the article is probably confusing.

How not? It doesn't explain it anywhere. Saying "I first heard about Foobar a while back" doesn't imply anything about the reader.

The fact that the author doesn't explain what they do anywhere (except for what you can infer by reading what they say about the product later) does.

> But if you don't know what bl—ch— in the third paragraph refers to

It took me longer than it should (pre-caffine) to parse this part of the article, so I'll supply a hint.

The article describes it as a "distributed cryptographic ledger," and Bitcoin is another instantiation of this idea.

It's "blockchain".

It took me a minute too to figure out what was up since I knew nothing about any of this either.

Normally when someone does that type of thing I just close the tab and move on. The writer though kept me interested until I finally figured it out.

Something about the style of how it was written?

Do the next three paragraphs not explain what it is? Were you hoping for three paragraphs of explanation before mentioning the name?

You are correct! This is known as signaling. If you hate the article, don’t understand it or would prefer to close the tab, then you have recognized that the signal was not for you. This is excellent. The author has written something that did not waste your time and has limited the people who interact with him to those who want to receive the signal. Be happy that he sent the signal early on. This is a sign of his respect for your time.

It would be confusing to call that signaling because signaling already means something different.