There is the technical issue, and there is the social/cultural issue. I really dislike the idea of just pushing blame to one side as a way justify a problematic behavior without external dependencies.
What do you think is harder:
The first option puts at the mercy of someone else. The second is completely up to the people using it. Seems to me a lot easier to just take some responsibility for my own actions than waiting for the devs to do as I wish.
Look, I'm upvoting you here because you are at least trying to have an open conversation about the post. I don't even necessarily agree with you, but I don't think your post is something that should be silenced or pushed away from view of other people.
On the other hand, you:
Do you see the problem here?
I don't browse by all, I use "sort by scaled" and I still see content from the most popular communities first.
What's wrong with just staying on lemmy.world with this account?
The problem is the opposite of what you are describing: I'm seeing downvotes on content that is perfectly fine on sport-related instances, and people are downvoting it... why? Because they don't care about it?
What is "extremist" in posts about football, American Football, basketball?
Yeah, hiding the post would be good.
But like I said in the post... It's not about "internet points", it's about visibility of "minority" and niche content getting completely eclipsed by the majority.
As the Fediverse grows and more people come with their own niche interests, there will be more and more smaller groups. If the people on the majority side thinks it's fine to downvote because "they don't care about that", then it stands to reason that every minority will be outnumbered and then the whole system becomes a popularity contest, only "common denominator" topics will get enough traction. This makes the whole system super bland and boring for everyone.
I see. I think this technical issue doesn't bother me as much as the fact that the communities I'd like to have are small in the first place. The Reddit mirror bots were solving this for me, but apparently I lost this battle.
Out of curiosity: how many communities would you have in your "subscribed" list?
And I downvote anyone who reads any post and assumes malicious intent and tries to grandstand before looking for common ground.
This is not about telling people what they should vote on, it's about trying to make the system work better for everyone.