Just finished reading the article. Best quote:
"Then I went to Fiverr.com and bought every UpVote package that was offered. Total cost: $35. Two hours later I came back to check the results. We were number one with over 500 comments already."
Interesting thing about buying upvotes -- after a while, they tend to stop registering. People only have so many accounts and IPs. If you have just one supplier or are supplying them all yourself, it's hard to buy/shill more than a few hundred. The Reddit algorithm starts detecting them and filtering out. If you buy "every upvote package offered" from a bunch of different sellers, you could probably get like 10x or even 20x, 30x the upvotes.
Definitely will test this out. Great post.