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.