The answer springs straight from the dominant business model online, in which everyone is trying to capture enormous traffic while employing as few people as possible. At Reddit, which Condé Nast purchased in 2006, then spun off in 2011, more and more work has been outsourced to unpaid moderators as the site and its traffic have grown. Many of the most popular subreddits have been created by their moderators, who retain effective control over them. The idea of ‘‘moderating’’ presupposes an outside vision of what is and isn’t acceptable in a conversation. But when moderators set their own rules, with no incentive to conform to anyone else’s standard, they can look a lot less like custodians and a lot more like petty tyrants.

Today Reddit is governed, insofar as it’s governed at all, by a cabal of high-powered moderators who coordinate with administrators in private forums. The most influential of these forums, Modtalk, allows access only to moderators who oversee subreddits with a combined subscriber base of at least 25,000. A convoluted moderator culture has developed, full of intrigue and drama. Moderators are deposed after power struggles; the community is periodically wracked by allegations of payola and other schemes in which moderators game Reddit for personal gain. Moderators parse Reddit employees’ every post to see if other moderators are in or out of favor with the company. When Ohanian made his first public comment during the Reddit Revolt, he first petitioned Modtalk, and only afterward spoke to the general masses.

The moderator class has become so detached from its mediating role at Reddit that it no longer functions as a means of creating a harmonious community, let alone a profitable business. It has become an end in itself — a sort of moderatocracy in which the underlying logic of moderation has been turned on its head. Under the watch of its moderators, Reddit has become a haven for extremists: The Southern Poverty Law Center recently called it the new ‘‘home on the Internet’’ for white supremacists, and it also functions as the central organizing point for the dubious ‘‘men’s rights’’ movement. For years, a moderator with the handle Violentacrez presided over an empire of execrable content on the site, including a hugely popular subreddit that shared sexualized photos of under-age girls, and another that glorified violence against women. (In 2012, when I wrote an article for Gawker outing Violent­acrez’s real identity as a programmer in Texas, other moderators rallied to defend him, going so far as to ban links to Gawker.) Any attempt to enforce real-world norms is rejected by the moderatocracy as impinging on their absolute authority over their miniature domains. Even before the revolt, Ellen Pao sparked much consternation by instituting an anti-harassment policy and banning a handful of subreddits with particularly vile content — Redditors nicknamed her Chairman Pao. Ohanian has excused Reddit’s underbelly as an inevitable result of human nature. But Reddit has made a strategic choice to abdicate responsibility to the moderatocracy in exchange for the promise of meteoric growth, even if its new chief executive, Steve Huffman, recently vowed to crack down on the worst subreddits.

History shows that things end poorly for companies that rely too heavily on moderatocracies. Probably the closest analogy to Reddit is AOL, which in the 1990s built a corps of thousands of volunteer ‘‘community leaders’’ to moderate its chat rooms and forums. Those community leaders eventually revolted, too; some sued for back pay, and AOL was forced to settle for a reported $15 million in 2010. The tension is intrinsic: Unpaid moderators will always feel the company does not appreciate them enough for the free labor they donate. Eventually, the company will change in a way that upsets the moderators. A tiny spark can ignite the built-up resentment.