I wasn't there but another reading might be that in both cases people resisted these efforts to obfuscate because they valued a frictionless clarity and the obfuscation interfered with their participation? I can't speak for this IRC community but on HN people will definitely resist obfuscation for that reason.
????
I'm not sure what to tell you. People don't necessarily want to decipher these riddles. If you want to communicate that way it's your right. But I don't anticipate it being well received by this community.