The site must also address other issues: Reddit isn’t very easy to use on smartphones, and it is technically and visually daunting to newcomers. Its internal technology is said to be underwhelming and, after years of operating as a neglected division of the magazine company Advance Publications, its management structure is sclerotic. After around two months on the job, Bethanye Blount, the company’s chief engineer, resigned this week because, she told the technology site ReCode, she did not think Reddit “could deliver on the promises being made to the community.”

Image Steve Huffman, a Reddit co-founder, has returned as its interim chief executive, responsible for solving its problems, including some angry users. Credit... Arsineh Houspian, via Fairfax Syndication

Still, with more than 160 million visitors a month, Reddit remains enormously popular, and if properly managed, could become a thriving business. “Reddit is this amazing community that grows out of a core branch of Internet culture — the old bulletin boards and chat rooms,” said John Borthwick, the chief executive of Betaworks, a company that builds social start-ups. Mr. Borthwick said Reddit had spawned its own branches — sites like Imgur, Giphy and even arguably Tumblr and BuzzFeed grew out of a cultural ethos shared with Reddit. “The branches off it are monetizing,” Mr. Borthwick said. “So can Reddit monetize? I think the answer is yes.”

But that gets to Reddit’s biggest problem — the tensions that flare up whenever Reddit’s executives move to clean up or otherwise improve the place with the aim of making money from it. Often, the dust-ups occur because Reddit’s users have little incentive to go along with the whims of the company’s corporate overlords.

The hundreds of volunteer moderators who spend countless hours on Reddit frequently say they feel cut off and blindsided by decisions made by the company. It was one such decision — the sudden dismissal of an employee who had been a popular liaison between the company and the moderators — that set off the most recent uprising, in which hundreds of moderators briefly took their Reddit sections down. The community’s suspicion is only natural; though the moderators spend much of their time keeping Reddit running, it is the company’s executives and investors who currently stand to gain the most from changes to the site.

“The last thing Redditors will accept is that feeling like someone’s trying to cash them out without their knowledge,” a user named VWSpeedRacer wrote in an “Ask Me Anything” session in which Mr. Huffman participated last week, a sentiment that has been widely echoed across the site in recent weeks.

“You have two competing forces now,” said Neetzan Zimmerman, the senior director of audience and strategy at the politics publication The Hill and a longtime watcher and user of Reddit. “You have the users and Reddit the company. And if you’re a Redditor and you love Reddit how it is, you might be looking at what’s happened recently and saying, ‘Everything’s great, we won.’ ”