I’m not sure if this is unpopular per se, but yeah, I don’t think people on here are voting in a consistent way and that makes it confusing to know which posts are actually unpopular opinions.
I have seen people say something like “nice unpopular opinion, take my upvote”, but the votes don’t reflect that sentiment when a truly unpopular opinion is posted and it’s heavily downvoted. Also, in reverse, posts that appear to be agreed-upon popular opinions are massively upvoted.
I think a good number of people on here downvote opinions they don’t agree with, which is a reflex I can empathize with, but doing that might discourage people to post here. So, I think people should upvoting posts you don’t agree with.
And I think that it should be posted clearly for people to read and refer to in the about section of the community. I think maybe it should be a pinned post too (at least for a little while) because I don’t think everyone reads the about sections.
TL;DR — For the sake of clarity, there should be a posted rule that basically states: upvotes mean you don’t agree with the opinion and downvotes mean you agree. So, if you agree with this post please downvote it.
Part of the problem is that the community isn’t isolated, it shows up on peoples’ All feeds, and folks who aren’t used to a community like this see a really shitty take and reflexively downvote and move on without realizing or caring that that’s kind of the point. We’d honestly be better served (IMO) reversing the norm, downvoting bad takes and upvoting popular ones… upvotes and downvotes don’t matter on Lemmy even to the limited extent that they did on Reddit (they aren’t contributing to a karma score or anything), so it wouldn’t be a problem like it ostensibly would have been there.
Where’s my upvote?
Kidding aside, my main concern isn’t “karma”; can’t speak for everyone though. While, I wanna see quality posts/discussions, I also really want clarity what people actually think are unpopular opinions. If the majority of the people want it your way, I’d be fine with it as long as people are voting consistently.
Also, if a take is reprehensible it gets taken down, like earlier today, a post was removed where someone basically said trans people are the modern day eunuchs. Yikes.
Unfortunately upvotes to affect a post’s placement in /hot. I don’t necessarily disagree with what you say (my comment below yours echoes pretty much the same thing), but downvoting posts that fit this page would hurt how it shows on certain feeds and give a false impression of the community to new users.