It sucks, but you need to read. Churning does affect your credit score, at least temporarily, so you need to understand what you are doing. Not knowing can hurt it longer, or permanently.

Doing research will also help with figuring out what offers seem to rotate in and out, so you know if it's worth waiting, or if a certain offer is the best one. You will also learn which programs you can transfer points between, and which programs might be worth staying away from.

As someone kind of brought up, you shouldn't churn blindly. Have a goal in mind. If you know where you want to go, where you want to stay, etc, that will help, a lot. You don't want to build up 100k UA miles, to realize what you really want/need is 100k AA miles.