Yep, exactly that. I recall that the voting was interesting because it was just ranked on absolute number of votes, no time decay or anything, so it would take quite some time for a new contender to accumulate votes to "compete" on the leaderboard. I don't remember if there were even accounts or if anyone could just vote repeatedly, modulo some IP or cookie-based limits.
As far provenance, I assume a lot of them were made up too, but this one was real.
So how did it work back in the day, people would just submit text and it would get upvoted? I always assumed like half of them were just made up.