These guys used to be Reddit. Now they're all gone. Condé Nast wants to spin-off social news site Reddit for $200 million, Peter Kafka reports.

He says "The publisher would continue to own the site, but it’s talking to investors about selling a stake."

"The theory: Taking Reddit outside of Condé Nast’s corporate structure would make the site that much more valuable, and would give it a better chance to compete for capital, managers and employees alongside the likes of zippy startups like Quora, StackExchange, etc."

Good timing.

Reddit, which used to be a Digg clone, but is now a successful Digg-killer, just had its first billion pageview month.

And guess what? Reddit did that with one – count'em, one – fulltime engineer at its disposal.

All the other Reddit employees (pictured) left last year.

Condé would use the cash to add to M&A guy (and ex-Yahoo) Andrew Siegel's ready-to-spend pile of cash, last counted at $500 million.

Reddit's turnaround story is a surprising one.

A couple years ago, the story was that Digg was holding out for a $300 million offer from Google, while Reddit suffering under old media stewardship at Condé Nast.

These stories explained how that all got turned upside down:

Update: The Next Web reached Reddit employee Jeremy Edberg, who denies Kafka's story.