With its basic graphics, endless links and discussions, Reddit can seem like peering into a bowl of spaghetti, but it has surpassed better-known aggregating sites like Digg to become a force on the Web. Occasionally, as in the instance of the Colorado shootings, it takes control of a news story early. Built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community, estimated by Quantcast to be 20 million users a month, it is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy.

So who are the silky venture capitalists or young lions of Valley technology who own this vast unruly kingdom? That would be Advance Publications, the home of Condé Nast, the magazine company that bought Reddit back in 2006 for a reported $20 million. That kind of deal is usually a signal that a ritual sacrifice was about to begin in which a clueless old media company snaps up a hot Web property and proceeds to squeeze the life out of what it just bought.

But that is not what happened. Steve Newhouse, the chairman of Advance.net, decided very early on that his company would not be the blob that ate Reddit, and for the most part, left well enough alone. “We had some ideas about what would be good, but it might not have worked,” Mr. Newhouse said. “We paid attention to the community instead.”

Its two founders, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, stayed on after the sale for three years — a feat unto itself. And when it became clear that Reddit was hamstrung in competition for leadership and engineers as part of Condé Nast, the company was spun out as an operationally independent subsidiary in 2011.