Currently votes lead t annoyance :D it's not fun to upvote if you are looking for that either you need to have 100.000$ to upvote by which point it's either not fun(if you invested) or you've already done it 1mil times to earn the steem :D

Tinders approach should be ok, yes not centered around growth and retention but still a good idea to get a date and move on maybe suggest to someone else. Anyways you would get tired after the 10th fail or if you are into the one night stands you wouldn't care for tinder for any other reason than "genitalis" gene-tails lol either way that is the main crowd for the tinder i guess.

Back to the topic. Much like dash we need to have a few things going, what you said is cool

but if an upvote only took effect after you upvote someone else, in other words, it was only contingent on a network effect, I could see upvotes being the core action.

after that lOOOLLLOLOLOOL follow low :D that's the worst follows are mostly pointless for me at least. I vote for people an rarely do i go over my feed, I just can't. I follow the top creators I've found good people that interest me and the lowest "fish" for support. If you don't use mechanical addons it's impossible and its not made to make sense why follow 1000 people and upvote 40 :D or all of them for 1% it should be CREATE AND CURATE simple as that or go the trinity route of steem to support easy transactions, business and such, upvote for the creators/curators and the resteem for the social 2000 followers accounts :D I think we need to reallly step up the game.

The platform is leaking and people are thinking of ways to increase the price.
Unless we start bringing in value like the start was, there were many awesome people sharing priceless stories and everything making thousands. that sells then the upvote matters, unless we get back there it's a bunch of BS , value comes from the people. use that Come to Steemit to bring value to yourself and others. :D benefit by making the world great

The problem is as I've said steemit isn't twitter to post 1000 times a day and have 5k followers (if we take the current ratio of 5:1 active users to authors)
neither is it facebook where you like away and have your entire town in there.
It's mostly reddit with crypto. But it lacks the communication because the incentives are driving the price down. Everyone is running around rushing for returns while not really doing anything :D

The sad part is Steemit can rule all markets if it's formed correctly, we can have our YT our soundcloud our data centers for medical research or whatnot, businesses and whatever else, but it's like a world within itself and the economy needs to be fixed for that the platform needs to have a direction and that is so smokey right now. Used to be can't be censured now it's silence there use to be people that believe now it's waaay below par everybody wants gains but just rotates value and the currency gets inflated to devaluation. a 1.5usd to .11 is like a 1300% drop in just 4 months :D it's wonderful we are all here still, most companies are already dead by this time :D