Encoded things are not meant to be human readable, like some sort of "secret code". The underlying bytes of some Unicode string probably won't be human-readable

Encoded things are not meant to be human readable, like some sort of "secret code". The underlying bytes of some Unicode string probably won't be human-readable if you read it byte per byte--it will be like the platform's "secret code" for your string. Conversely, you can decode the byte message into something readable, ie. your Unicode string.