We curate the front page for interestingness (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Advertisement has nothing to do with it. If there's a class of articles you're seeing here consistently that you don't think gratifies intellectual curiosity, I'd like to know what they are. Usually the trouble is that users don't all share the same curiosity, but it's possible that we need to make a change somehow.

We also try to make sure that hard-paywalled articles don't appear on the front page, though that's gotten complicated because those publications work differently for different users.