There are less than 27K visual novels on itch.io, out of almost 900K games. Three percent of titles have a "chokehold" on itch.io now? Might as well make a separate category for horror too, because that's the other thing everyone complains about. Guess those aren't games anymore, just because some people don't like them. And are you sure it's okay to assume what people can do, or why they didn't?
Viewing post in Visual Novel Category
A negative filtering system would alleviate the problems people have had with itch.io over the years wrt to finding the games they want to play and are interested in seeing. I never said they're not games, only that I would like to be able to filter them out as well as filtering out horror games at the same time. As it stands, I can only filter one at a time and my content feed tends to filled with the other because of their high popularity in recent months. I was merely offering a more out of the box suggestion because requests for a filter system seem to receive little apparent consideration from administration. If you are tired of seeing these suggestions, then maybe it would be best for administration to address that it will/will not ever be a feature.
But that's just it. To find the games you want to play, shouldn't you search for what you want to play, instead of trying to avoid the rest? That's how the search system on itch.io is designed: to let you include tags. And it works very well. Many people find my games that way.
You're right, visual novels and horror games are very popular, so they tend to cluster in the first few pages of results. But again, they represent 3% and 5% respectively of the 900K games currently on itch.io (we've passed the 900K mark since a few days ago). if all you want is to exclude those, all you have to do is click through to page 3 of results or so. But are you really interested in all other kinds of games? Because if you're not, it's easier to look only at the tags you want.
Sure, you might have to run several searches that way. But I doubt you were going to find many games you like by looking at "everything but visual novels and horror". Since, you know, that would be 830K remaining titles.