SS13 is, IMO, an inherently newbie-unfriendly game. However, there are servers and new players guides online, for Goon (one group of servers) and tg (another group of servers), and probably others that I'm not familiar with.
This is not specific to you, but in general people saying some social media site is "actually useful (TM)" is usually a cope to justify the staggering amount of life they've burned sucking dopamine from the website's teat. Can social media be useful? Yes. But there is a point where you get severely diminished returns, at which you would be better off doing something else, but we hide behind excuses to avoid feeling bad about ourselves.