A community-driven business doesn’t have to run itself the way its community does, any more than an airline’s backoffice should be run by two people in a cockpit. But the business does need to be fluent in the values and dynamics of its community, just as the airline’s CEO needs to understand that passengers should be treated differently than freight. That helps explain why last week the users of Reddit.com, a popular message board, were up in arms.

Community-driven businesses should learn two important lessons from the Reddit rebellion. First, if there’s a significant difference between the culture and values of the business and the community, it will take more than a change in culture to fix it; it may require changes in the organization and core processes. Second, the Reddit turmoil should be understood first and foremost from the community’s perspective, not management’s. Because at Reddit the community is both customer and “product,” this requires much more than a blithe “The customer is always right” philosophy. Rather, management needs to align itself deeply with the customers’ culture.

Culture is at the heart of Reddit. It is often talked about as a community, but its scale—169M unique visitors a month—stretches that term. Rather, it’s helpful to think of it not just as a community but as a culture that springs from a set of values and a form of discourse. At its best it’s a remarkable and positive culture. At its worst, it is demeaning and even hateful, all too often suffering from an assumed boy-ism that can create discomfort, or worse, for women and those deemed cultural outsiders. Characterizing Reddit’s overall culture is difficult if only because each discussion board (“subreddit”) has its own flavor, but redditors’ pride in their community, and their identity as redditors, is undeniable.

The precipitating cause of the Reddit Rebellion is itself a strong indication that the event should be understood first in cultural terms. An immensely popular employee, Victoria Taylor, was dismissed; neither side is talking about why, although a common speculation was that Taylor objected to a rumored plan by Reddit’s management—what we’ll call “RedditCo”—to monetize the subreddit that Taylor facilitated.

This is where RedditCo’s management went very wrong. First, it failed to recognize the vital role Victoria played in the community, and the repercussions her dismissal would have on that community. Then, when moderators (“mods”) of many of the most popular subreddits shut down their sites to protest Victoria’s abrupt termination and subsequent lack of management communication, ex-interim CEO Ellen Pao took to mainstream media, rather than the platform she managed. Worse, she dismissed the community’s concerns:

“Ms. Pao says that the most virulent detractors on the site are a vocal minority, and that the vast majority of Reddit users are uninterested in what unfolded over the past 48 hours. “Most of the community is made up of thoughtful people, and they can appreciate what we all do, even if we don’t always agree,” Ms. Pao said.

This angered the community even further, and not just because it seemed to imply that the protestors were not thoughtful. As users quickly pointed out, most of the site’s content (and indeed, the vast majority of community-driven websites) is created by that tiny percentage, and mods put in an enormous amount of volunteer labor to keep the subreddits appealing. It was exactly like dismissing a work stoppage by the most active editors of Wikipedia on the grounds that they’re just a tiny percentage of overall users. Without them, there is no Wikipedia.

When Pao eventually issued an apology, first under a smaller subreddit and eventually under the official communication channel, it was too little, too late. Pao’s behavior confirmed to the Reddit culture that she was not, in the phrase redditors sometimes use, “One of us! One of us!” (The phrase comes from the cult movie Freaks; redditors use it in a self-mocking way.) The alienation of management from its users was just about complete.

This was a fall of some great distance. At the birth of Reddit, there was a remarkable alignment of business and community. That alignment had been manifested in a few ways. First, management maintained as close to a pure Free Speech policy as the law allowed, signaling trust in its community. Management had already eroded that trust by recently shutting down some subreddits dedicated to hating and shaming. Second, Reddit traditionally has consulted with the community about business decisions, using subreddits as the mechanism for doing so. Third, Reddit has sponsored or participated in popular altruistic programs and has said it will share profits with charities chosen by its users. Fourth, Reddit initiated the 2013 online protests against SOPA/PIPA that led to major websites sites shutting down for a day in protest.

So how could this deep alignment fail so quickly?

A big part of the answer is that RedditCo only had one person in direct, visible, continuous contact with its community: Victoria. And Victoria could not have been better at it. Even though she was a paid employee of Reddit, she spoke and acted first and foremost like a member of the community. She was indeed “One of us! One of us!”

The problem is that Victoria was the only RedditCo employee who was so widely and consistently visible. When she was fired, it was One of Us—even, perhaps The Best of Us—who was not being appreciated. The community felt disrespected, insulted, alienated. The alignment was turning out to be at risk, if not revealed as having been illusory all along.

RedditCo seemed at first to view this through a management lens. Viewed that way, the community unrest is a PR problem, or an issue to be addressed through the usual business incentives, perhaps by starting to pay the mods who are wrangling the subreddits. It’s like any other product kerfuffle to be minimized, controlled, and out-waited.

If viewed through the lens of culture, different imperatives emerge. For example,the civic technologist Ethan Zuckerman has studied why global cultures tend to isolate themselves on the Net, even though they are all just one click away from each other. At a minimum, he concludes, cultures need what he calls bridge figures who not only speak both languages, but who can bring one culture to appreciate the values of the other. The same is true when the business and user cultures fall apart. Management needs bridge figures, and Reddit fired its best one. Because there are so few others, her presumedly involuntary departure was seen not just as a loss but as a betrayal, as if RedditCo thinks it needs no bridges.

This is a structural failing that RedditCo needs to address: it needs many more Victorias. It needs them as paid employees, and it also needs to let unpaid bridge figures emerge from the community, primarily by engaging in public with the mods.

It’s crucial that in all of RedditCo’s engagements with its community, from the CEO through its paid and community bridge figures, it needs to embrace the values and forms of discourse of the Reddit community. The new CEO, co-founder Steve Huffman, is off to a good start. The announcement of his appointment was done on Reddit, and Huffman immediately engaged in a long, open, and frank conversation with the community.

Reddit has been a success story because it has embodied the “Gettysburg Principles”: Internet companies do well when they are of, by, and for their users. We have more than a little confidence that Reddit will get back on track because its founders and workforce are inclined by character and values to operate their business under those principles. They are indeed “One of us!” The challenge will be for Reddit to resist the urge to treat its community purely as a product as it drives toward profitability.