No, reaching level 3 requires a lot of posts read. Somewhere there’s the actual number you need to read, but I’ve already written a post today on how to get level 3:
Also bear in mind your level does decay after like a month if you don’t keep up on the number of required posts to read (which is somewhere around several thousand), so you might have to repeat the trick once a month depending on your level of activity.
What I do is just set my computer to auto-shutdown when I go to bed and then just leave it to auto-scroll through a mega thread.