Reddit CEO Yishan Wong has a nontraditional background. Reddit For years, Reddit, the social-news site, languished as an obscure subsidiary of Advance Publications, the owner of magazine publisher Condé Nast.

Now it's hot, hosting a live Q&A with the most powerful man in the world, David Carr notes in the New York Times.

But President Barack Obama is just the latest celebrity to make the rounds of Reddit, which has become the top social-news site around, thanks to a largely hands-off policy by its owners.

Reddit was probably the biggest beneficiary of Digg's implosion, as users of that site fled a botched redesign. As its traffic exploded, Advance gave Reddit more freedom, not less, reorganizing it as an independent corporation, bringing back cofounder Alexis Ohanian as a board member, and hiring a well-connected Silicon Valley engineer, Yishan Wong, as its CEO.

Wong may not have the traditional CEO resume. But his status as an early engineer at PayPal and Facebook meant he ran in the right circles. And his recent experience as a devoted user of Quora, the question-and-answer site, raised his profile among the Silicon Valley cognoscenti.

Reddit, which was once down to a handful of engineers and business executives, has been on a hiring spree. Besides Wong, it's added a general counsel and several engineers. More than two dozen LinkedIn members list Reddit as their current employer now.

Carr doesn't touch on this in his profile, but people in the Valley are expecting Advance to fully spin Reddit out any day now and bring in big outside investors. (Currently, Reddit is an independent corporation with Advance as the largest shareholder.)

Update: We clarified Reddit's ownership status: It's been an independent corporation since April 2012.