Truth be told, this doesn't change much, but I'd still like to make it official.
As of about 17 days ago, I have stepped down as the head mod of 196 on both this platform and lemmy.world. I will be yielding that title to the much more qualified Qaz, who's been functionally in charge for quite a while now.
Despite what you may think, I make this choice really only for one reason: I don't have nearly enough spare time in my life to be consistently available enough to be head mod.
What does this change/what does this mean?
To be honest, pretty much nothing for all of you. I've barely been available for the past however many months it's been, and in that time the community has been run exclusively by Qaz and the rest of the team.
All that you'll see changed is that Qaz will at times be the one that makes an announcement, and Qaz is now the only person that can make moderatorial decisions (bans, ect) without checking with the rest of the team (a power reserved for head mod).
I'll still be around. I'm still a mod, I'll still do announcements at times, and the rules post will most likely stay as my account, but from now on, Qaz gets the final say, not me.
I banned Stamets a couple times over the last year for posting an anti-trans meme and a different instance of not tagging NSFW. Stamets is a repeat offender, hence the ban from Moss. Banning people for not tagging NSFW is in the stated rules. Repeat offenders are held to a higher standard. The "trolling" tag was because they plainly refused to tag the post.
I might buy that for Stamets but not necessarily for the other people who commented in that thread. Some of those people had very illegitimate bans indeed.
It's in the modlog, you don't need to take my word for it.
We have an email people can reach out to. We all have access to it so we can keep each other accountable. If anyone feels that they've been unfairly banned, they can reach out to the email and a mod unrelated to the ban will address it. We've let go of a mod in the past for unfairly banning people, it's not like we're going to defend each other for no reason. We're a team, sure, but my justice-flavored autism isn't going to hold that relationship over doing the right thing.