Mnemonics and personal notes: the difference between a deck and your deck
A memory trick you write on your own card is different from a private note you jot on someone else's. Encodr treats them differently on purpose.
The mental hook that makes a card stick is rarely the fact itself - it's the weird association you built around it. Encodr has a place for that association, and which kind of place depends on whether the card is actually yours.
On your own deck
If you own the deck, a mnemonic is deck content, the same as the question and answer. Write one, and anyone the deck is shared with - by access code, or as a public deck - sees it too. That's deliberate: your memory trick might be exactly the hook someone else needs, and there's no reason to hide it on a card you wrote yourself.
On a deck you don't own
Study a curated class or someone else's shared deck, and the equation flips. You can still add a memory aid, but it's saved as a private note attached only to your account - never visible to the deck's owner, never shown to anyone else studying the same shared deck, and never written into the shared card itself. It's the same idea as writing in the margin of a library book: your note helps you, and it doesn't touch anyone else's copy.
Why the split matters
A curated class or a friend's shared deck is a single shared object - if your margin note could edit it, you'd either be silently changing what everyone else studies or blocked from personalizing your own review of it at all. Splitting the two lets you personalize a card without ever affecting the version anyone else sees, which matters most on exactly the content you don't control: a class you're enrolled in, not one you wrote. When you flip a card, RevealMnemonic shows you both where relevant - the author's mnemonic if the card owner wrote one, and "Your note" if you added your own.
Encodr turns this into a habit: study anything in a feed, and it schedules the rest.
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