I unfortunately just recently started looking into BTC and ALT coins and while there is a ton of information here it is hard for me to discern good info from bad. It seems like a lot of the things people post are either ads or sarcastic comments to steer people away. Any tips on who to trust?
Build your own trust list. Use DefaultTrust for a little bit. As you interact with the community, find the people you think are trustworthy and build your own trust lists. As you do that, also build your own ignore list. You can start with DannyHamilton's list here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=973843.0. It includes pretty much everyone that wears a sig ad (which unfortunately includes me) since most people with sig ads will spam. As you interact with the community, build your own ignore list.