I would say that depends on what you're trying to achieve. If you're trying to get an overview of the space then probably one of the best ways of going about it to locate key figures that are involved in different projects (e.g. Vitalik Buterin, Charles Hoskinson) and listen to some podcasts with them or read stuff that they wrote. If you're trying to get a fairly good understanding of some specific technology or aspect of it then you must do your own research and that should be enough to be able to identify and ignore "those people" + as a bonus you might gain insights about the shortcomings or trade-offs of that thing.
But then if you're looking for investment opportunities then you should definitely have a very good understanding of what you're getting into, any why - especially if you're being purely speculative and not doing stuff like arbitrage or some form of DeFi farming, etc.
It seems every online community these days is full of people hyping up a crypto project for financial gain.
I tried to curate my sub Reddits and still can’t escape it in the comment threads.
Even Product Hunt is just a launching ground for NFT projects these days, crowding out interesting other product launches…