Exactly. It was basically a share-ier Twitter long before Twitter, built on an open standard (RSS.) You could subscribe to every news website's RSS feed and at the time, most would offer their full content in your feed. You had incredible power to curate and refine your feed based on your interests and social circle.
Together with reshared count, it implemented a very effective peer review mechanism.
Having high adoption, it provided me very good feeds - nothing comes close now.