At first it was all about presenting data in an original looking way. In the end it was about pushing political ideas in your throat using a plain bar graph. It was not about sharing something interesting you found but about taking advantage of a captive audience.
Imo even with how the downvote/upvote in Reddit work, theoretically speaking there could be ways for r/unpopularopinion to work with some configurations. For example, automatically delete any post that gained a certain amount of upvotes. It’s understandable that upvotes should be given to unpopular but interesting opinions that actually fits the sub, but since it’s been shown that’s not how people do it that behaviour should have been used to keep the content relevant.
Change the css so that hitting the up arrow downvotes and hitting the down button up votes. The users could use the voting buttons as usual but the unpopular posts and comments would be pushed to the top.
That’d a neat idea. The only real problem I see with it is some users turn the CSS off, but I doubt that’s the majority of users.
A sub “the tenth dentist” (I forget the specific name) had a system where if you agreed with it you down vote, whereas if you disagree you upvote. I think it made moderation probably kind of tricky (they also had a way to flag things as hugely improbable/karma farming) but it at least kept the spirit of truly unpopular opinions at the forefront.