You can expand the abstract by clicking on the ... at the end of the text.
4 karma · joined October 14, 2012
Yep, the ranking mechanism is based mostly off of altmetrics, but we also modify the score based on the number of clicks through to the article, or the discuss* page and the age of the article (similar to the HN decay algorithm), plus a few other things.
* so this sort of does the upvote thing, but in a more subtle way - having the filtered list sounds like a great idea though!
Yeah, filtering was one of the things we had planned but we just ran out of time to do it properly. Once the judging is over we'll take a look at it.