The company has 70 to 80 employees and relies largely upon its thousands of dedicated power users to govern the site. Reddit has grown over the last few years, regularly having more than 160 million visitors every month.

After Ms. Taylor’s departure from Reddit, hundreds of messages supporting her appeared.

“The admins didn’t realize how much we rely on Victoria,” wrote one user, who goes by the user name Karmanaut. “We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed.”

In an interview last week, Ms. Pao and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder and executive chairman of Reddit, did not give a reason for Ms. Taylor’s dismissal. But the two apologized profusely for the way the company had handled what it called “a transition.”

That did not placate many Reddit power users and so-called moderators of the site, who have repeatedly stated that Reddit management has shown poor communication for years. Ms. Pao, in particular, has been a target for personal attacks, many of them racist and misogynistic in nature. As of Monday, an online petition asking for Ms. Pao to step down had reached more than 190,000 signatures.

When asked about her most vitriolic detractors, Ms. Pao said that those people represented a vocal minority of the site’s members, and that she appreciated most users, even if they sometimes disagreed on policies.