I think Faucets are great for Bitcoin personally. It gives people new some small amount of coins to play around with it and see how they like it. If you spend 8 hours a day every day doing faucet, you might get 1 BTC(MIGHT). Basically you would be like making .001 cent per hour. No one wants to actually do that. Faucets are great for newbies who want to earn some coins without risking any of their own money at the start.
I did the calculations and it's actually worse than I expected. A high paying faucet might give out 1,000 satoshis per hour. I know Freebitco.in gives out 600. If you used the faucet 8 hours per day, you would get 8,000 satoshis per day. Since 1 BTC is equal to 100 million satoshis, it would take 12,500 days (34 years) to make 1 BTC. By then, it's likely that the BTC price would be much higher than today so it's possible that you will never reach 1 BTC at all (since faucet payments tend to drop as the value of BTC rises).
i don't think faucets "harm" bitcoin. if anything they are a nice help for beginners and newbies to start of their bitcoin journey with a small amount of satoshi to play with and learn.
if you do a survey or a poll topic you'll see a lot of members here started off by using faucets (me included)
The faucets don't really "harm" bitcoin in anyway, but a user who relies too much on faucets would likely face problems in the future as it will create dusts in his or her wallet.
Sending less than 0.01 BTC to any recipient — The network considers these small outputs to be “dust,” and discourages them by requiring a fee. If it was not discouraged, someone could take 1.0 BTC, and create 1,000,000 transactions of 0.000001 BTC each, for free, which would clog the network. So, that's one definition of dust.
^ From the Armory client wiki.
The problem of dust withdrawals can be mitigated somewhat by using services such as Coinbox.me and Microwallet.org. You can visit a number of different faucet sites and wait until you have a significant amount of BTC which can then be transferred to your actual wallet. Earning enough from faucet sites to make 0.01 BTC would be hard, but 0.001 BTC could be possible.
and there are a lot of faucet sites out there that are scams....
How does this work? Either you get free bitcoins or you don't... but they never ask you anything in exchange.
By definition its a week clicking nonstop with max ~8min intervals for minimum payout
But that's not a scam. You know exactly how much you are receiving. There's no lie anywhere.
If a faucet doesn't pay out despite promising that it would then I'd say it's dishonest and a scam - albeit a scam for pennies. While you don't actually lose any of your own money, you do waste your time solving captchas and clicking buttons and the faucet owner does get a tiny bit of money from ads. A faucet that does pay out, on the other hand, would not be a scam. Even if it only paid out tiny amounts (as long as the pay rates are displayed clearly on the site).