there's no shortcut on how to distinguish high potential projects. if you want to get out of the top alts, and check out the new ones. you really have to dedicate your time assessing them and digging their background. it is not an easy task as you need to apply all your learnings in crypto to identify the potential valuable projects. and if someone is suggesting you with a specific project, don't just follow blindly as he may just be endorsing it because he has vested interest on the project.
so yeah, signals in crypto is not to be trusted as most of them will just lure you to spend your funds and lose it in the process. you need to be smart when choosing a project to invest with.
Indeed! Reading about any project in depth is a time consuming process and sometimes very frustrating because of the patience it requires to read the WP, learn more about the team, analyze the scalability of the project and other things like the token metrics. In the end, you spend 5-7 days learning everything and find some holes in the project, it feels horrible because you want some kind of reward when you work that hard in learning about a project but understand it's not going to work.
This is the reason people go with other's recommendations because not everyone has the patience and the ability to understand the project inside out. This is where some groups will take advantage by taking money and promoting a scam project. No one else will ever help you earn money, this is one logic that I always tell myself when I am trying to trust someone.