Well, there isn't any particular way, I just started looking at traditional startups on angel list that were making/doing things related to crypto, then quickly became interested in decentralized uncollateralized algorithmic stablecoins and started contributing with pull requests and community discussions. From there I just followed my own interests.
> What are the trends, top dApps and sites, Discord servers?
You'd cant go wrong familiarizing yourself with things like decentralized exchanges, decentralized lending (that run the gambit from over collateralized to uncollateralized) protocols, stable coins of various designs (decentralized or not) and concepts like staking, yield farming, liquidity pools, oracles, flash loans. With those terms, should be enough for you to DYOR and see if anything interests you to dig deeper (its ok if non of it does).
> How do you follow the meta?
I don't. I narrow in on the topics that most interest me from my experience working in tradfi and look for analogues in defi, I look for ways defi can make the barriers to do such things accessible to people that don't work on bank desks.
>It’s hard to find the signal when crypto and DeFi by proxy are already so spammy and noisy.
Yeah, i can understand that may be the case when one is mostly looking for "top" stuff and not topics/communities that may genuinely interest them (i.e. have a particular finance topic in mind) that people are trying to do in a decentralized way.
These are not mutually exclusive. I just want to find high-quality projects that interest me, which may or may not be already popular/successful. It’s hard to navigate the spaces sometimes because it’s hard to know the status quo. I can’t even determine the lay of the land because of filter bubbles.
Didn't say they were.
> I just want to find high-quality projects
Of course everyone does, but one won't be able to tell the difference at first, and so its best to jump in on any project related to a particular field of interest, start discussing/asking questions with people in those communities (without trying to allocate any of your financial capital), start analyzing the contracts code, and you'll slowly find out about more projects/ideas/concepts.
> It’s hard to navigate the spaces sometimes because it’s hard to know the status quo.
Well, what the status quo is isn't really important in the exploratory stages, because no matter where you land, people may have different opinions on what that even is and it will be up to you to determine what's the best course of action for yourself.