Most free web sites pay for their upkeep with ads. It has been an unwritten agreement since forever (or at least as long as there have been ads on the web) that if you consume the content, you pay the creator by looking at the ads on their site.
Consuming the content without looking at the ads is like shoplifting because you don’t like the way a store’s checkout counter works and/or the fact that they want money from you at all.
I don’t agree, but thanks for posting an actually unpopular opinion. Based on the voting, this sub should just get renamed to popularopinion and be done with it.
I think downvotes on truly unpopular opinions probably come from users who don’t notice which community the post is in.
That’s certainly a good explanation, but it really calls into question the viability of a sub like this. On reddit, the engaged folks drown it out and mostly keep the unpopular opinions intact. This and the super highly-upvoted political stuff just makes it look like this sub has no purpose at all.
Why? In Reddit you can’t reply if you get downvoted so there’s an incentive to flip upvoting and downvoting.
In Lemmy there’s no such mechanic so why flip them?
Because it’s the point of the sub as indicated by the name? Why would anyone want to post an unpopular opinion here after the votes and comments on this thread? And to be clear, this is insanely low stakes. I could not care any less if this becomes popular opinion sub #1000 that I can add to my block list. But…assuming we’re here in these comments because we like the idea of the sub, does it not make sense to embrace that and upvote the unpopular stuff? I’m also thinking through things like sorting by all time, which is ruined for this sub if the votes continue like this.
Does Lemmy have any sort of algorithm that puts more upvoted posts to the top and drown out downvoted posts? Or is it more based on replies?