The voting guidelines are an attempt to encourage actual unpopular opinions to "rise to the top", so to speak, as that is the purpose of the community. Obvious troll (or other rule-violating) posts should be reported rather than just downvoted, but we kind of expected people to embrace the spirit of the community. While many do, there are several problems with this approach:

1. As others have stated, people just knee-jerk to the downvote button when they see something they disagree with
2. 80% or more of the people on this platform don't bother to read the rules for any community
3. Muscle memory
4. Edit: When a post from here shows up in /all for someone who isn't familiar with the community, we can't really expect them to click into it to look at the voting guidelines prior to voting.

We put out a poll a while back asking if the voting guidelines should be changed, but there was no majority in favor of it, so they remain the same.

This is an extremely popular opinion.

Heres my opinion: Votes doesn't matter, it merely inhibits conversation when we can express your reaction to a post with a click of a button instead of explaining our own thoughts on the matter.

Just post what you want to post and try to avoid looking at the number, or go over to an app or instance that doesn't show votes, or allows you to select your own settings for votes, or only shows upvotes.

I see the down voting more often as a method of saying "this is a troll" or "this opinion is unpopular because it is evil/ makes no sense". I've seen plenty of unpopular opinions that have decent ratios while genuinely being unpopular.

I think it's similar to how the right wing views the first amendment in the US. You can say whatever you want that's unpopular. Noone is stopping you. But that doesn't mean that you're entitled to upvotes for being a bigot or troll just because it technically fits the subject of the sub.

Upvotes/downvotes dont matter on this site. Its not like reddit where downvotes limit how much you can comment and upvotes are required to participate in communities.

Its dumb that people cant upvote opinoins they disagree with but it is what it is. Maybe the OP should post a comment saying Agree and a comment saying disagree so only the people who bothered to open the thread can vote.

It can get mixed up. People can upvote their agreement with the sentiment that it's unpopular or the agreement with the opinion itself. It makes the arrow system unreliable because you can't be sure they see it as choosing between agreeing with the opinion and agreeing with its unpopularity.

The only unpopular opinions I have seen downvoted to hell (recently at least) have been objective facts that were incorrect. Saying your opinion is [thing that is untrue] should still go into a black hole.

I upvoted this not because you are correct but because you care about votes. Least popular thing I can think of. Nice job.

Lemmy is different from Reddit. On Reddit you get pushed content to keep you busy. On Lemmy you just get the most active and new content. So I'm guessing a lot of people just get these posts in their feed without even being subscribed to this community.

Who cares about votes?

Upvoting and downvoting are supposed to be relevant to the sub not to ones feelings. But we're human so we like to piss in each other's soups so we vote with our feelings and not our brains. So to speak.

It would be good if they do away with votes altogether for this community.

I lot of people don't understand how voting is supposed to be done in unpopular opinions

You realize the votes are meaningless, correct? It's ok to get downvoted, the internet is not real life. This is an opportunity to stop taking yourself and the internet so seriously.