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You're fighting an uphill battle with your argument, because I'm quite sure I've never (nor have many people reading HN) encountered targeted advertising based

• kbenson 13y ago
  Curated ads on blogs with content I appreciate are different. But that's editorial curation. Which is fine, and is in line with my point, which is that given ads, making them more useful without increasing the negatives, is a net win. I'm not arguing that we have seen that, just that if we could, that's a good thing. Distilled this down to its most basic form, names on the front of shops are advertising. To someone looking for a specific shop, they serve an immediate and useful purpose. To those just trying to enjoy a stroll down the street, they may seem annoying eye-sores. At any future date, those roles could be reversed. Like most things in life, advertising spans a spectrum, in this case from almost entirely useful with few negative side effects (reasonably represented shop names), to entirely useless (long boring message about a product you couldn't use, event if you wanted to). I see no reason not to try to eliminate as much of the latter as possible.