I think the main rebuttal to that argument is what stops that from happening in a hierarchy? If anything having one makes that more likely, since someone in charge can have a bad idea and no one below them has any real power to stop it. There’s a reason “incompetent boss/manager” is such a common trope. Having a horizontal structure where consensus is prioritized actually helps prevent those sorts of issues, since people who are the most knowledgeable and involved in the process are the ones making those decisions. It’s why group brainstorming sessions are so common, bouncing ideas off of other people involved in a project is extremely useful to help filter or improve bad ideas and build on good ones. Horizontal groups are sort of the natural state that you fall into when collaborating with people when there isn’t an existing rigidly enforced hierarchy between the members.

Polygender!

I had to look it up the first time I saw this meme too lol. Prideflags.org is super useful to try and reverse search for a prideflag. It doesn’t have this one but it tends to be the first place I go to if I don’t recognize a flag.

I like the anti-authoritarianism and no genocide denial rules, it’s just the term tankie being used specifically that feels like the biggest issue imo. It’s misused so often that it kinda ends up excluding a decent number of people. Someone doesn’t need to self-identify as a tankie to feel excluded, just getting called one enough by others for expressing anything left-wing can do it. Its not that I think any of the mods here would use it to wrongly remove stuff like a .world community might, but for people who don’t know as much about Lemmy/196 it wouldn’t be surprising for people to assume that because they get called a tankie on world that they wouldn’t be welcome here.

And definitely agreed human rights violations and genocides definitely shouldn’t be defended regardless of what country did them, but I think since we already have the no genocide denial rule those should be covered anyway.

I’m definitely a fan of sending a dm explaining why action was taken to the relevant user. In that sort of spirit would it be a good idea to include the username of the mod in the message for the modlog? With how hard it can be to try and figure out which mod did what action it can lead to misunderstandings, and trying to make that more transparent could be good. Would also help show if a particular mod is abusing their position or something (I don’t think it’s super likely you all would do that on purpose, but still).

One rule I think might be a good idea is that mods aren’t allowed to moderate their own posts/comment chains. Not that it’s really been an issue on 196 in the past afaik, but there are some communities where the mods will get into an argument with another user and then remove comments for incivility or a similar rule which obviously has massive potential for abuse. Assuming there are enough mods where it’s not an issue to do so (which seems very likely based on the number of people interested in moderating) preventing situations like that entirely seems beneficial.