These days what people experience as the "Internet" is a view that is curated by capitalism. Many just see it through the mega tech corporations such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter (now X). Facebook is a black hole that just wants you on their "platform" 100% of the time to monetize your data into ad revenue. Google, as everyone knows, started out as a search engine, but developed into a whole platform to feed their ad revenue. Both of these companies dragnet your browsing even when you aren't on their sites through links back to them, "like" features, and planted ads that just because they load, communicate back to the platforms.
Today's experience is a cesspool of ads and now with "AI" the content we are all trying to find will have even less value. So, how can we spend less time being exposed to advertising and increase the quality of what we see?
Web Browser
It seems like everyone uses Google's chrome browser these days. I just don't like to support "the goog" by using it. I can't trust that it isn't just commoditizing all my surfing. I'm sure the tech nerds will pick apart my snubbing. I have historical reasons for being counter-current with my browser choice and that is web standards. Back in the early days Microsoft had their Internet Explorer and they built a lot of IE only functionality into it. I don't know if it was intentionally done to create lock-in, but that was the effect. Websites wouldn't run without you using IE. We still see that today when web software lists the browsers that "work" with them.
Alternate browsers are the way to go. Mozilla Firefox, Vivaldi, and I'm sure others. Regardless of your browser choice, you should run a privacy plug-in to fight back on all the tracking. One is uBlock origin and the other is Privacy Badger, pick which ever one you like. They block a vast amount of website trackers that litter the Internet. Personally, I use a locked down version of it called LibreWolf. There are some sites that just won't work with all the privacy features so sometimes I have to switch to Firefox to get things to work.
Firefox comes with a "reader view" which strips out all content that is not the main content of the page. I can't stand viewing webpages that have little videos playing. What a distraction and waste of computing resources and bandwidth. In reader view, you can customize the font and size you like to read. I love to use this when I go to sites that are in "dark mode". Most of the time my old eyes have a tough time with that. One click into reader view and I've got the standard black text on a white background. It has themes so if you are a "dark mode" kind of person you can let reader view save the day. When I was using chrome, I looked for and found a reader view add-on.
PRO TIP: Sometimes reader view will let you read articles that are behind paywalls. Just click on it as soon as it is active.
RSS Reader
Another indispensable tool is an RSS reader. Most websites that have some content as "articles" or "blogs" will have an RSS feed. RSS is short for "Really Simple Syndication". With a reader you can subscribe to as many feeds as you like. When you update the reader it visits all those subscriptions and lines them all up for you to read at your convenience.