It seems like the Vanilla Forums people have taken the same viewpoint as Plex that their users are too stupid to handle choice so they removed choice as much as possible from their product.
This dumbing down of the interface is irritating but it is becoming pervasive throughout the world of computers.
This statement from that other thread says a LOT about the Vanilla people and the fact that they care little about the people that actually use their product:
@beckfield Howdy, I’m the lead developer who approved the change. Thanks for reaching out. Cloud support actually won’t be able to help you since you’re not the customer.
Also this tells me that they are uninterested in the true customers:
We’ve renamed the “Hide Category” option on the category list to “Mute Category” and changed what it does. Instead of hiding the category entirely, it now ONLY removes those discussions from the Recent Discussions list. This solves quite a few issues:
General confusion. Folks would unintentionally hide a category or forgot they did it.
Re-finding a hid category was not intuitive. It required toggling to "show hidden categories" mode using a special module in the sidebar. Folks didn't understand this non-parallel workflow well (hide via 1 action in menu, unhide by doing 2 unrelated steps).
That module was frequently not included in new themes, meaning there was literally no way to go about un-hiding a category.
We don't see a strong use in hiding categories from the full categories list.
We don't like the feature any more and want to rework it as a subscribe / unfollow model in the future.
By halving its functionality and renaming it, we made a clear intermediary feature that lets folks continue filtering their Recent Discussions list for now without any of the confusion it was causing. Better experience, less support. We’ll revisit it when we can devote resources to rethinking the entire experience of the Recent Discussions list.
The have shown that they, not their actual users, are the stupid ones and they do not really care about supporting a varied group of users. They want everyone shoved into the same little box where everyone is the same.
It is the “Conform or use something else” view that Plex is also supporting so I do not think Plex will in any way even ask for the “Hide” function to be brought back. Plex, Vanilla and many other software companies are using that model and they appear to be uninterested in in any way adding to user choice as the users are too stupid to handle it.
