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Credit Illustration by Javier Jaén. Gamma-Keystone/Getty Images.

Let us begin with a toast to the unsung hero of the social-media age: the moderator. Slayer of Internet trolls! Extinguisher of flame wars! Bulwark against race hatred and child pornography! The Internet as we know it could not exist without moderators, constantly pruning back the wild undergrowth of human nature that proliferates there. Nearly every major commercial site with user content is policed by human moderators. Some are unpaid volunteers who agree to enforce administrators’ rules; others are outsourced workers in the Philippines who flag dirty pictures posted to social media, or domestic employees who delete libelous comments. If you want to see what the Internet looks like without moderators … well, I’m not even going to tell you where to go, because we’d all be raided by the F.B.I. Let’s just say it’s immoderate.

Moderators are, by definition, forces for stability and civility in the raucous digital realm. Or that is, they’re supposed to be. Recently, the influential online message board Reddit was plunged into chaos by its army of volunteer moderators. It all started in early July, after Reddit abruptly fired an employee named Victoria Taylor. Taylor was well liked by Reddit’s moderators. She was the liaison between the company and its hugely popular Ask Me Anything section, where celebrities and other notable people answer questions from the Reddit community. Although unpaid, the moderators of Ask Me Anything approach their task more seriously than many people do their day jobs. Upset by Taylor’s disappearance, they shut down their entire forum, which gets millions of visits every day; this exploded into a sitewide protest, as dozens of other moderators locked down their forums as well. They wanted to give voice to their feeling, in one moderator’s words, that the company’s bosses ‘‘do not respect the work that is put in by the thousands of unpaid volunteers who maintain the communities of the 9,656 active subreddits,’’ as the individual forums are called.

The Reddit Revolt, as it came to be known, made headlines worldwide and made Reddit useless, at least temporarily. Much of the ire was aimed at Reddit’s interim chief executive, Ellen Pao. A petition demanding Pao’s resignation reached more than 200,000 signatures, and she was inundated with abuse on social media, some of it sexist and racist.

A week later, Pao resigned. Pao’s official reason was that Reddit’s board asked for a level of growth she felt she could not deliver. (Reddit recently raised $50 million in venture capital.) Nevertheless, the companywide disruption revealed the extreme power of the site’s moderators, and the unpredictability with which they wield it. At the height of the controversy, Reddit’s chairman and co-founder, Alexis Ohanian, pleaded with moderators to reactivate their subreddits. He sounded rather like a zookeeper, trying to coax back into its cage the angry lion who had just devoured a park guest. There is nothing moderate about holding the 10th-most-visited website in America hostage over a personnel change. How could a site’s moderators turn into its main source of volatility?

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.

So what will become of the moderatocracy? The hottest tech companies no longer want to run communities, with all their messy, unprofitable human drama. Instead, they want to make platforms: slick, frictionless, infinitely monetizable. Companies like Facebook and Google try to create the illusion that their platforms are moderated by algorithms, not people. They quietly employ huge teams of human moderators, working under strict nondisclosure agreements, and yet these platforms feel the same pressure as Reddit to expand faster than their human resources allow. So an increasing amount of what once was moderation now falls to normal users like you and me. We flag offensive photos on Facebook and frauds on Airbnb. We report the troll on Twitter, and when they are quickly suspended, we feel extremely gratified — and extremely powerful. The moderatocracy lives on inside us all.