I may be spoiled by the social media, but I find refreshing when someone reads a thread and agrees or likes it, but instead of just commenting, decides to upvote.

But since new users can not upvote... they must be upvoted firsts!
Which creates a bottleneck: you can not upvote until someone upvotes you enough.
Since we are just a bunch of lads... there's not enough upvotes to "unlock" that capability!

would it be a problem to reduce the threshold for some time?

Anyways, just a suggestion.
Back to my ale!