Sure, Ellen Pao had to leave Reddit. But we’re not done hearing about the online company that bills itself as the front page of the Internet.

The latest dust-up at Reddit highlights a dilemma that doesn’t go away with an unpopular chief executive: Who really runs the place?

Will the most fervent users of the vast collection of Reddit forums continue to resist efforts from the top to create a few guidelines and make the site friendlier and more accessible? Can Reddit, the 10th-most popular website by traffic in the United States, continue to grow and earn more money?

Reddit is often dismissed as a grab bag of conversations, many of them silly and occasionally offensive. But it is also a large, anonymous community of 160 million users worldwide who jump into one of 9,000 forums to ask questions, argue and share ideas, silly and profound, which are voted up or down by others. President Barack Obama is among the many VIPs and celebrities who have appeared on Reddit to take questions.

“Reddit is a national treasure,” said Chris Tolles, chief executive of Topix, a Palo Alto-based online news site organized by communities of interest. “This is what the Internet is supposed to do.”

But pushing such a disparate community to change can be nearly impossible. “You have to look at it as a new kind of political system (rather) than a business,” he said.

In some respects, we’ve seen this story before: a decentralized community with volunteers who build the service and a professional administration trying to create some standards or make a few changes, many times with an eye to make it profitable.

Cue the insurrection.

Pao was, of course, a lightning rod since her failed gender discrimination suit against her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

And since she took on the Reddit role late last year, she has made controversial moves such as establishing new anti-harassment standards. In the wake of the celebrity hacking scandal in which nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and other celebrities appeared on Reddit and elsewhere, she banned nude photos and videos on the site, unless the subjects gave permission.

Pao struck deep into the core of Reddit’s culture, which sees itself as a bastion for free speech, when she banned several forums, including one devoted to fat-shaming. The company declined to make Pao available for an interview .

But this time, the issue was bigger than Pao. It’s what happens when a company’s product is the people itself. Getting these participants to show up and work on the service, for free, every day is its success, not necessarily what they produce.

Tech companies from Reddit to Uber tend to overvalue the platforms they’ve built. They just create the scaffolding, said Rachel Happe, co-founder and principal at The Community Roundtable, a consultancy for online communities.

“They don’t see the relationships as the primary product,” she said.

Look at Reddit. Those 9,000 discussion forums are all run by volunteer moderators, or “mods.”

Earlier this month, the mods turned off popular forums when they learned that Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s director of talent, was fired. She had, they said, been one of the few at Reddit who helped them with running these forums. They shut down forums in protest, wrote an op-ed for The New York Times and lambasted Reddit on — where else? — Reddit for ignoring their needs. More than 200,000 people signed an online petition calling for Pao’s resignation.

The company was startled to see the mass shutdown of subreddits, the name of the moderated forums, such as the popular Ask Me Anything, on which Obama had participated. It got so bad that Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian was reportedly making late night calls last weekend begging the moderators to switch the discussion groups back on.

Some of the same tension can be found at Wikipedia, which decided years ago to be run by a foundation after users revolted over the prospect of advertising on the site. More recently, volunteers have pushed back on software updates.

The Wikipedia staff is “hostage” to the community, said Lane Rasberry, Wikipedian in residence at Consumer Reports. If they get highhanded, they know “the community will shut down everything.”

In their op-ed, the Reddit moderators said their issue was about more than Taylor’s dismissal. They groused that they were largely ignored by Reddit administrators and complained that they were long overdue better tools to use on the site. Their complaints seemed important but almost petty given the petulant action they took, like high school students walking out of class because the right kind of pencils hadn’t shown up.

Reddit’s leadership appeared to realize that this was its watershed moment. Pao said in her own Reddit post that she and the staff acknowledged their “long history of mistakes.” Then, on Friday, she resigned, becoming the second Reddit leader in less than a year to do so.

“She brought focus to chaos, recruited a world-class team of executives and drove growth,” Sam Altman, a board member, said in a statement.

Now what?

Her replacement, Steve Huffman, was a Reddit co-founder with Ohanian, “basically mom and dad to Reddit,” as one commenter said on the site.

The key will be whether Reddit’s leaders accept that they are hostages to the Reddit community.

If they don’t, Redditors will just take the conversation someplace else.

Contact Michelle Quinn at 510-394-4196 and mquinn@mercurynews.com. Follow her at Twitter.com/michellequinn.