Yes, this setting was intentionally set a few month ago. Because, unfortunately, the trading category attracts too many low-quality posts and what this setting prevents, is that new people open the forum for the first time, seeing the overview cluttered with topics like:
“ADA continues to Decline from recent highs of 10 cents”
“First Warning NOW NOW NOW”
“Klaxon Horn Going Off”
“Likely ADA no spike 2019”
On the other hand, we don’t want to censor these kinds of topics either, so people have to click into the trading category to read these types of topics or change this in their settings.
I’d like to add that this “muted category”-setting was only one of a few changes (find them here: Updated Guidelines for the trading category) that we did to the forum, and the trading category got a lot better since then. The community should decide in the future if this is still needed.