Good Sign:
1. Roadmap - there should be at least a roadmap and what the project wants to accomplished. At least a good 3 - 6 months project pipeline.
2. The team - the devs or the top management should be also has a name and a face in the Whitepaper so that we can verify if they are really legit or not.
3. Jargon - not too much technical terms, because most investors will not understand it anyways. Brief concise and straight to the point.
Bad Sign:
1. Spelling mistakes - If I found some spelling or grammar mistakes, I tend to stay away because it doesn't look professional. They are asking investors to pour money on them and yet they can't even proof read their paper
2. No teams mentioned. - very shady to me
Yeah, after reading many whitepapers It's not so hard to spot a shady/bad ones. I always skip projects that doesn't reveal details about team and advisors.
To good signs, I would also add detailed fund section and comparsion with competing projects.
you only read an altcoin's whitepaper if you are interested in its technology and want to learn more about how it works and what ideas it is implementing. otherwise as a trader reading the whitepaper of an altcoin is not going to give you any worthwhile information about it. altcoins work based on hype and pump and dump. and neither of the good ones ever give you as big a profit as a pumped shitcoin can give you.
Well, if you only focus on short time hype trading it is true, whitepaper and basics won't matter. But if you also invest long term, it may show the potential of the project.