Hodling is just another term for long-term investing, and with long-term investing you should be 100% sure that you are making the right choice. If you don't do extensive and intelligent research (reading a few articles and discussions doesn't count), you are not investing, you are gambling, and the odds are really bad, because most altcoins are doomed in the long run, the world doesn't need thousands of coins, most users won't use more than 1-3 coins. Also most of those projects are some sort of a scam where no promises will ever be delivered. So, for newbies the simplest and most effective thing is to hodl Bitcoin, since it's 100% not a scam and it has the smallest chance to fail because it has the best developers in the world.