You were also artifically inflating your popularity, so, even though your instructable was not top notch it could be ranked that way! this means that when the people chose (potentially) you could have “falsely” won. this is what I am getting at.
When I said “people chose” i was referring to the public that you distributed your link to. (I could have phrased it better, yes.)
I.e if you had distributed your less than top notch instructable to millions of people somehow, you would have falsely won due to the increased chance of the people chosing to vote for your one “cz i was told to!”
In this way, what you and Spaz did are one in the same (by the looks of things viral distribution is supported on both sites, probably to advertise the website)
Although the brickfish judging system seems to be the better of the two, im almost sure (could be wrong, if so, do tell me.) the amount of votes recieved for images will factor into the judges final decision.
And by calling it “the sad truth” it would seem that you saw it as a bad practise 
This is spam.