Wired Digital, parent company of the Wired.com technology portal, has acquired the Reddit social news service for an undisclosed sum.

Reddit was founded around the same time as Digg. Although the service has a loyal user base, it attracts significantly less traffic.

Although Reddit’s four employees will move to Wired’s San Francisco office, the site will remain to operate autonomously, the company said on its blog.

“We’re still going to be the guys reading your feedback emails and keeping reddit chugging along. We’ve also been given about as much autonomy as an acquired company could get. In fact, they’ve insisted that we focus on growing reddit. With their resources, we’re looking to do some neat things in the coming months.”

Similar to Digg, Reddit allows users to submit content and lets user vote for the most interesting story. Popular stories will be promoted to the front page.

Reddit is different from Digg however in allowing users to disapprove of submitted content as well. A negative vote decreases a story’s overall vote count as well as the ‘karma score‘ for the user who submitted the URL.

Karma scores are further impacted by users voting on comments. Reddit claims that the score is used for bragging rights only.

Digg in the past has mentioned that it uses a karma score to battle spam. Users gain karma points when the stories they submit are promoted to the front page. A user’s karma score is then used to weigh their vote. Critics have charged that this systems has spawned a group of elite Diggers who can effectively control which stories end up on the service’s front page.

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