I'm not convinced, as it creates the possibility of egregious violations of community standards being difficult for moderators to detect.
Less of an issue, but still worth some thought: Just like paywalled submissions must be by-passable so that we can all share in a conversation equally, base64 threatens to create subthreads that are not equally accessible. (Trivial easy if you are on a laptop, not on mobile).
That's a fair point. Acting in good faith I had not considered abuse of the technique.
I've often wondered what a forum would look like where you could make the equivalent of 'aside' comments. The way someone might, while you're speaking, say softly "hyPERbolee, not HYper-bowl" to correct you without interrupting.
Perhaps a good example is StackOverflow's Q&A format w/ comments and chats. You can comment and move to chats but the emphasis is on the important part: the question and the answers.
Allowing voting on these "asides" in StackOverflow permits all of the usual stuff while relegating them to the asides they are.
Of course, in the case of what I used it for, it is generally impolite to offer advice unasked but the nature of slow feedback loops means it's better for me to offer an ignorable piece of thing. i.e. if you think I'm an idiot, I want you to have the power to ignore me. That is only polite to compensate for the brain-hacking strength of having text describe you. You can't ignore it afterwards.
>I've often wondered what a forum would look like where you could make the equivalent of 'aside' comments. The way someone might, while you're speaking, say softly "hyPERbolee, not HYper-bowl" to correct you without interrupting.
That would either be PMs, or the forum equivalent of posting "sage" on an imageboard (which prevents the post from bumping,) neither of which HN supports.
Although given the forum's focus on quality over quantity, I think some kind of "whisper" mode might be worth looking at, to opt out of having such comments from appear on the new comments page.
Yeah, I considered PMs but they're really not the same because the point is that everyone benefits with low attention contribution. The whisper mode is totally what I was thinking of.
They could be comments that are automatically marked dead for everyone but the intended recipient. People with showdead on already self-select for higher noise content anyway.
Less of an issue, but still worth some thought: Just like paywalled submissions must be by-passable so that we can all share in a conversation equally, base64 threatens to create subthreads that are not equally accessible. (Trivial easy if you are on a laptop, not on mobile).