Well, the former Reddit founder is on the team. And I seem to recall reading something about how that did that with early Reddit posts too (marking the voting counts much higher to make it seem like they have more users than they did).

They just didn't quite do it good enough. Would have made it more believable if they did a random 5 to 10 addition on each signup. Probably had to rush out the landing page to capitalize on the opportune MtGox disaster.