I'm not sure what "backseat modding" means. We all help moderate the community; it's why we have vote buttons and flag buttons, both of which are worth using in this case.
I didn't decide on the word by way or a rational chain of logic, but merely by having hindbrain pattern matching trigger on your behavior, based on what i've seen called that on other forums, and what i've seen you doing on here from time to time. If i had to put it in words, it would probably be something like "tell other people how to use HN without contributing significantly to the discussion at hand", since that is typically the job of actual mods, not of users.
In any case, it's not that i mind you doing it, but if it's done without any explanation it irks me for the aforementioned reasons.
(Note: My brain classifies even my response to your first post here as backseat modding.)
I'm doing a lot of things at once. I'm fixing a buggy register allocator, and I'm not that smart, so I can do real work for about 15 minutes before my brain overheats. I bounce to the HN front page: there's a story about regexes, and a recent trend of stories about how there are alternatives to standard regex libraries. I think, maybe this will be one of those stories. Click. Nope, it isn't. I wonder, did anyone write the comment where they point out that rather than tediously optimizing regexes, it's sometimes more profitable just to hand-code a quick lexer? Nope, but, look at this: a creepy comment about "young girls" and regexes. Nope. Flag. Downvote. The comment isn't grey! Someone voted this creepy thing up! Write a quick comment. Back to debugging the world's worst compiler IR.
That's how you end up with an imperfect complaint comment. Oh well! Thanks for motivating me to improve it.
See, the same thing just happened, just now; I vented a little more brain steam, and now can hopefully spend another solid 15 minutes trying to fix this bug. :)
> Downvote. The comment isn't grey! Someone voted this creepy thing up!
I have a comment at -1 points right now that shows up (to me) as black. It used to be grey. I don't know if authors now see all of their own comments in full black or if comments revert to black after a certain period of time or what, but I'm not prepared to guarantee that a comment in full black has more than 0 points.
HN doesn't grey comments out for their authors anymore; it rubs salt on the downvote wounds, and, more often than not, a comment you notice as grey right now will be black again in just a few minutes, so why beg people to write about it?
But HN definitely does still show negative comments from other people as grey.
