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.
I think more often than not with any discussion I’ve had on Reddit I didn’t encounter this attitude. People voted with what they agree with. If you add additional information to someone’s comment or post you might get up voted than as well. I wish the Redditiquette way of voting was used. It would filter out posts that don’t belong in that community and highlight comments that add to the conversation.
I think in order for that to work and really take hold you would need to either have it plastered everywhere in a community in a way even mobile users could see it or have it as an instance wide thing. Because Lemmy is federated I don’t think there will ever be a consensus among users to change this.