Readability Redux plugin (chrome) helps with this. Or you can read in a console-based browser (w3m works well, screen or elinks* variants).

But, yeah.

I'm finding increasingly site design for content-based sites gets in the way of content. G+ is among the worse offenders in this regard (particularly as various plug-ins to fix this keep breaking themselves). I tend to browse it with the Developer Tools element inspector open, deleting the stuff that bugs me most.