One of the internet’s most popular and most democratic websites has undergone its version of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movement, all at once.

Over the weekend, the moderators of Reddit – a website often championed as a refuge of freedom, weirdness and vulgarity – revolted against their commercial overlords.

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Many of these unpaid, democratically-elected moderators shut down their forums in mutiny. Hundreds of these pages, possibly 300 or more, went dark to protest against censorship, autocracy, monetisation and everything else you could imagine.

The underlying cause, an expert told The New Daily, was a push from the website’s investors to turn a profit from what has, until now, been an open and free way to debate and share jokes, photos, videos and news.

Ms Pao has become a hated figure, despite simply doing the investors’ bidding. Photo: Getty

Reddit reportedly plans to list on the US stockmarket, with interim CEO Ellen Pao tasked with monetising this unwieldy beast.

“What we’re looking at is really badly managed cultural change in an organisation that’s trying to turn into a commercial organisation or to make more money,” said University of Canberra social media expert Dr Sam Hinton.

The spark of the rebellion was the abrupt dismissal of one of the website’s popular employee, Victoria Taylor.

Ms Taylor oversaw the ‘Ask Me Anything‘ page, a question-and-answer forum that has hosted the likes of President Barack Obama, Julian Assange, Game of Thrones actor Peter Dinklage and actor Bill Murray.

No public reason was given for her firing. A “plausible” theory is that the company wanted to charge fees for access to her page, and that she fought back.

“Even among the administrators, there is quite a strong association with the community and the idea of free speech,” Dr Hinton said.

It has not helped that Ms Pao (dubbed ‘Chairman Pao’) has censored some of the site’s most inappropriate content, including revenge porn, homophobia, racism and fat shaming, angering many users.

In years past, all manner of vile and violent content (think gruesome death photos) was allowed to co-exist alongside the utterly vacuous (think ShowerThoughts).

Nor has it helped that Ms Pao is a lawyer, a former venture capitalist, the wife of a hedge fund manager and a graduate of both Princeton and Harvard Universities.

Anti-elitist and anti-commercial sentiments, as well as sexism and racism, may all play a part in the uprising.

“She’s almost the pin-up girl for everything that’s wrong with American society,” Dr Hinton said.

“She’s become the ‘Evil Queen’, and there have been an awful lot of negative and nasty things said on Reddit about her.

This was the error message that greeted many Reddit users over the weekend.

“You’ve got to wonder how much would have happened if the CEO was a white guy.”

After the blackout, a petition was circulated calling for Ms Pao’s resignation. It now has more than 195,000 digital signatures.

Ms Pao finally responded to the mounting pressure on Tuesday morning, conceding she had lost the “trust” of users and pledging to change her approach.

“We screwed up,” she said in a statement posted to Reddit.

“We haven’t communicated well, and we have surprised moderators and the community with big changes.

“Today, we acknowledge this long history of mistakes.”

It may be too late.

Reddit is only valuable if it has users. Thousands have already started to migrate, sometimes crashing the smaller websites to which they move.

Billions of dollars may have been already wiped from Reddit’s future share value, Dr Hinton said.

“The question is, can anyone commercialise a website like that without there being bloody noses,” he said.

“I suspect not, although there are probably good ways to manage it and bad.

“If Pao loses her job, it will be because of how badly it was managed.

“It could end up smashing the site.”