Boaty Mcboatface (2016) is slightly newer in the history of Reddit meming compared to “upvote this picture of foo so it shows up in google for bar”. Those go back as more than 11 years ago to when people were posting swasticas to make Office Depot look bad (2013) followed by the same meme being done to comcast 8 years ago also in 2016 which might be why you thought of boatface.