Somewhere early on in like '99 advertisers started using flash based banners. You might have seen them mentioned or know what I mean right off the bat. Ads in websites made in Macromedia Flash, they were loud, annoying, slowed down older systems and would sometimes trap your cursor in them. While these phased out soon enough, I suppose, I did the best I could to avoid ads online. I was an early, but casual, adapter of Ublock, even when google did all they could to make their sites and affiliated run slower on anything that wasn't chrome.
Through various little add-ons I have always managed or at least tried to keep a lot of annoying elements out. Here I highlight some plugins or addons you can use you remove obtrusive web elements like pop-ups and ads! Keep in mind however this is a constant tug-of-war. People get paid to work around ad-blockers and such for advertising companies and it's an ongoing race. Sometimes an addon won't work for a bit and you just have to go exploring for help or temporary replacements.
First and foremost, for whatever social media you use, just flip that on "Following" and not "For You". That's the start! That's how you already stop a lot interfering posts. You might still see "related" or "recommended" posts from time to time depending on the social media you're using, but this will help. What I tend to do is specifically make my bookmarks of the websites be the subscriptions pages.
Phones! I personally use an Android model and can't properly discus these things for iOS or other distinct brands.
Crack your apps using Revanced Manager to (most of the time) get build in ad-block and promotion-block. I'm trying to cut down on my youtube time, but I currently use NewPipe for android.
ReVanced Manager
I did it for twitter ages ago when I still used it, and use it for tumblr now. On the Tumblr Mobile app, sometimes blazed posts slip through, but it's few and far in between most of the time and it blocks normal ads and other types of promoted posts.
Next is your browser! I think most people still use either Chrome or Internet Explorer/Edge. Edge is still very outdated, and Chrome is a privacy nightmare with more and more AI shoved into it. I had used Firefox for the longest time and recently made the jump to WaterFox. Mozilla is still willing to put AI in their browser and while you're given the option to opt out, this was hidden from most users and would reset every update. I didn't trust that so I jumped to a more transparent version.
Grab WaterFox yourself here!
There are other browsers out there you can look at, but for most versions of FireFox, you can use the same addons and plugins! You can simply go to the regular FireFox Market and install a great amount of these on almost any branch!
First thing to do on your new browser is grabbing Ublock Origins. This comes for most browsers and can be easily found on their respective webmarkets or just the Ublock Site itself. I have read that people are working on workarounds for Chrome but I do not personally keep up with Chrome anymore.
It's pretty much plug-and-play once you install it. I don't often need to search out tech support anymore for it.
And that's pretty much it for 90% of your casual browsing!
Enjoy actually seeing the people you wanted to follow and not get assaulted with ads around every corner!