You need to put it in the join clause, not the where:
SELECT *
FROM categories
LEFT JOIN user_category_subscriptions ON
user_category_subscriptions.category_id = categories.category_id
and user_category_subscriptions.user_id =1
See, with an inner join, putting a clause in the join or the where is equivalent. However, with an outer join, they are vastly different.
As a join condition, you specify the rowset that you will be joining to the table. This means that it evaluates user_id = 1 first, and takes the subset of user_category_subscriptions with a user_id of 1 to join to all of the rows in categories. This will give you all of the rows in categories, while only the categories that this particular user has subscribed to will have any information in the user_category_subscriptions columns. Of course, all other categories will be populated with null in the user_category_subscriptions columns.
Conversely, a where clause does the join, and then reduces the rowset. So, this does all of the joins and then eliminates all rows where user_id doesn't equal 1. You're left with an inefficient way to get an inner join.
Hopefully this helps!