Topic: The Good the bad and the ugly side of airdrops (Read 651 times)

Any activity focused on possible free tokens is a kind of roulette. After all, you never know for sure which node, testnet, airdrop, will yield a profit and which will not. Just like you can never guess which altcoin will give 10 000x profit and which will not. There is no universal formula, though I'm still happy about questions like "tell me a gem that will grow 100 times"

This is very true, as past time by some of the airdrops have no more value which is why new projects today are offering bounty campaigns for new projects and this is to promote the projects and how they can contribute to the cryptocurrency world.

The coins being distributed through AirDrops are mostly shitcoins that are in 99% of cases bound to not rise and only be a hype among some shills. The owners take the advantage of this shilling to sell off their coins and drain the bitcoins from fooled newbies while cashing out themselves and exiting. Added to that is the risk of identity theft through the airdrop signup forms. Cant help it is people are so foolish as to give their personal information to internet strangers and hope to get gold in return.

Again the world is full of fools and that is why such scams thrive.

I did it as well and I think most of us do it because it was asked upon registration until such time we realize that we are giving them a way to use our personal info for another evil business. It was too late to think about it but it was done already and we can't get it back. Hopefully, this could give an example to the newcomer to keep themselves as anonymous as possible. Airdrops today are getting worse which is not worthy to trust and give what they ask from us. We can say a lot of people make money from joining this but for now, they are just only shitcoins and no marker value.

most of the airdrops are scams. that's one of the main reasons I avoid this kind of airdrop because it's not worth the time and results we get. if you are still interested in the airdrop then that's fine because all decisions depend on you, but remember if they ask you to do KYC then it's better to ignore it. Your personal data is much more important than just to claim the airdrop coins.

I used to join Airdrops back then and the info where you filled your information is publicized which is kinda bad for us and not too long before I realized I did a fatal mistake putting my personal email in the public. I ended up getting multiple spam emails which I really regret and by that time, I really don't know what to do or what was going on. the only remedy I used was to quickly migrate my accounts to another email which I don't use for any airdrop anymore and the old email that I used is continuously receiving spam messages until now, this is how bad it is to put your personal emails in the public like joining the Airdrops and bounties.

Yes, in the past year, there has been an airdrop project that launched a large number of rewards for the participants, that is Aptos. Each participant who becomes a tester for them will get a reward of 150 APT, and if you sell them for 10$ on average, you will get 1500k. If someone were luckier and sold at a higher price of $50, they would have made a higher profit. But projects like APT are sporadic in the market, and I have only seen 1 project in the past year.

good list there mate , but for me ? there is only one side here and that is favoring the team/company , because they truly care nothing for airdoppers , had joined several airdrop i think if i remember it right 6 of them and guess what, only one of them that lets me generate income and only hundred of dollars, that's why i totally forget about this and move to bounty and here in bitcoin paying campaigning .
agreed , abusers keep in taking the project down so with hard task it will be more possible for legit kind of operation to earn droplets .

I think it's a good thing, not a sad thing, like testnet they require more tasks and more difficult tasks. This will help us curb cheaters and everyone will get a fairer reward. And whether we receive the reward or not depends on each person's research ability and project choice. It's like we invest in new altcoins, which can be profitable or scams. When you invest, there is no guarantee that it will be profitable, so don't ask for free projects that will pay you 100%.

Or just like the early airdrop, you just need to post your wallet address and the free token or coins will be in their way to your wallet.


Yeah most airdrop today looks like a mini bounty campaign since most I see needs a participant to perform several tasks before getting qualified for an airdrop which is very different from the airdrop perform in this forum way back 2014 - 2015, just post an address, no retweet, no share, no putting their project on social media platform username.

I think that one is called shilling and it's part of a bounty not airdrop. The old form of airdrops are fairly simple. You only need to share one post or you are also required to follow their social media accounts and then like their airdrop post. That's it, you are now qualified to receive a token. Sadly that has changed. Airdrops now have gotten more complex.

I am not even sure if they can still be called as an airdrop but they more like a mini bounty campaign now. There's also no guarantees if we can get a token because it works like a lottery now despite of all the hard work that you have done. There are other things out there which are more worthy for our time than the airdrops.

There hasn't been any in the past 1 year as far as I am aware. If I am wrong then I would like to be proven wrong, but ever since the bull period, there hasn't been any project that did airdrops that gave people 100+ dollars each, whatever has happened has been lower than that threshold and to be fair if you are working that hard for a project, you should be either get paid at least 100 dollars for it, or if not then you should not be working for them.

It's not an easy task at all, it's something that people work hard on just to get paid and bounties and airdrops do not give people anything good in return because they all suck, most new projects are just pure shit and terrible.

But I think the airdrops project is really easy to work on and doesn't require capital first to be able to work on it and can get free prizes or tokens.
Even though there are indeed airdrop projects that are difficult to work on and require extra thought to be able to complete them, airdrop projects like this are usually difficult to find and on average in the future they will have a slightly valuable value compared to most existing airdrops.
In recent times, I have also never heard of an airdrop project that has successfully developed and provided big profits for its followers or the person working on the airdrop.

That is true that old forms of airdrops. As I have said, most of those airdrops is because of ICO once again ICO is a thing a few years back and it is what I just explained just now. Anyway, there are airdrops we can join right now which is a not legit airdrop unlike those old airdrops I mentioned but we can't deny that airdrop is not a lot. Honestly, for a country with a fiat currency like dollar won't be a the same as other countries where in dollar is a small amount but in other fiat currency then it is not that small amount of money. In short, don't waste time in airdrops.

Old forms of airdrops such as spam on telegram or social networks can be said to be outdated and no longer bring any worthy rewards to participants. We should stay away from it to avoid wasting time as well as being scammed.

Nowadays, people have chosen testnet or retroactive as an alternative, maybe not every project pays to join, but the rewards are also very commensurate with the effort we put in. Those who still want to earn free money can try the testnet or retroactive, the chance of getting the reward will be higher than the spam airdrop and bounty.

Additional for this one, It is much better to never join an airdrop. This has been discussed many times and joining airdrop is no longer the same as before where we can earn free money just by completing some simple steps compared to this day. I am sure that you know airdrop is very trending before where many people joined airdrops to earn some money. Honestly, I joined airdrop before and I did earn some money until it is no longer trending. Airdrops will be started when a project (mostly ICO that time) wanted to do some airdrop for everyone.

Airdrop is not just about giving your receiving address anymore, it requires more work like sharing it online and following their social media platform, you still exert effort on that which can’t still guaranteed any return. Many are still hoping for the golden years of airdrop to come back, I’m not that lucky to receive any profitable airdrop so I also hope that one day, I can experience this one too.

Its no that easy nowadays as they required additional documents and to qualify for more rewards its better for you to invite more participants which makes this airdrop even harder. Anyway, there’s nothing to lose though and you can just use your fake identity as long as you provided your correct address information to receive the reward, some bounty hunters are still aiming for the airdrop hoping that they can get lucky on it.

Projects now announce airdrop events in advance, you just need to pay attention to their social media handles; For example; Celestia is presently running an incentivized testnet event for their node; while we have projects such as Onomy, Starknet announce same incentivized testnet event as welll.

And yes, projects announcing airdrop does not mean they cannot be fake because they can; a good example is the nightly solana wallet scam that took place just yesterday.
Always dyor and make sure to create a testnet wallet for these events

The airdrops project is a very easy project to work on and can give us free crypto from participating in the airdrops project.
But for now expecting more from airdrops will only be in vain and a waste of time because almost all airdrops are useless. Even though there are indeed some airdrops that have value and store gold hidden in them, to be able to find airdrops like this has a 1 in 1000 chance or very hard to find.

I think airdrops are a thing which are not confirmed if you  participated in  airdrops so not anyone say that definitely the will receive a Airdrop its a half half system and according to my experience is that sometimes airdrops are give a huge reward but some airdrop thousands airdrops are ongoing everyday but mostly are scam airdrops.

There were no valuable Airdrops in 2017, different from this year, even counting a few Airdrops that have value, because interest in airdrops to the public is greatly reduced at this time, so that's why more and more years are disappearing even a lot of fraud is spread on several social media and spammers on telegrams promoting several Airdrops..

Most airdrops are just a waste of time, because they do no good. The examples you gave of successful airdrop are either retrodrops among early users or testnet participants. The various airdrop from gleam, or twitter, unfortunately do not belong to the category of good, or even promising airdrop. It's all a pursuit of measly cents that are not worth the time spent.

sorry about that.
after I searched what you said it turned out that the testnet airdrop was not random distribution but like there was a task to be completed and if the completed task meets the requirements then the member gets a reward.

after all, it turns out that many testnet airdrops think that airdrops are a bit complicated and not many take part in airdrops like that (TestNet) so that the participants are few and the allocations that are distributed in large quantities are distributed among the few participants.
It also seems interesting to see airdrop testnet opportunities like the new hype airdrop

The good of airdrop you didn't include is that it remains one of the oldest form of making an earning in the cryptocurrency community with little efforts or contributions. And the bad sad of it is that many are just a bait to lure the newbies into getting scammed. Lot of people have gotten their wallets hacked as a result of connecting and approving transactions on dubious dapps all in the name of claiming airdrops.

One needs to be careful and do his research well before participating in airdrops which require approval of transactions on once wallets through a dapp.

It's like you invest in an altcoin project, even though you invest money and you support the project to make the project successful because when the project is successful you will also get a bigger profit. But things are not as you think, you work hard to maintain the project but the developers try to pull the project down and take your money. That is the risk in investment we should accept, participating in the airdrop too, as long as it is related to money and benefits, people will defy it.
Airdrop, although no longer brings significant profits, but still exists to this day, proves that there are still a lot of people participating and making profits, it's just that we are no longer suitable for it.

And that is a huge problem, I have seen in the past airdrops in which people participated for a period longer than a year and they did all what they could to make the project a success, and once the project became successful the developers simply refused to pay the rewards they promised or they reduced the pool of the rewards to ridiculous levels, so even if a project succeeds you do not know if you will get paid, so it is not surprising people are not interested in airdrops anymore.

All of these days, I haven't seen any airdrops that are worth participating in. Might be too harsh to say they are worthless but that is the reality now. Some developers try to offer airdrops to promote their non-working projects and promised huge rewards but you can just sell them if they become successful. And the question is if they become successful. Because mostly it turn into a broken promise and after the airdrops, we never heard any updates from them on whether the project succeed or not, and where we can trade our free coins.

Even though you didn't spend a dime for the airdrop, you volunteered your precious time to work on the airdrop task. time is also a valuable capital, because every second is precious. But even so, all the time will pay off if you get an airdrop that really pays properly and even gets a big airdrop with a sizable fee. Running nodes are the most popular airdrop option at the moment. After several successful people with APTOS, there is more interest from hunters to work on Running Node Tesnet.

Not all airdrop now pays people. Most of them uses this kind of strategy to gain people in their community and to reach more investors, and once they are already in an exchange they will change the rules and will requires people to do KYC, in which I can say that very unfair for us. I also see some airdrops asking for passport, people need to be careful for their identity and they need to keep it secured and do not be deceive by small amount of money or any value of it in exchange of your identity.

In this case i said that Airdrop are many types some airdrop are confirmed in the form of Test Task , Claim nft , subscription ect but according to my experience is that its not confirmed you got some thing through Airdrop but if a project are good and honest team so they definitely give profit his hunter and some time a simple airdrop you done a few simple task and they give you huge amount profit.

Airdrop is just a kind of gambe. If we're lucky, we'll enjoy good profit out of it. If not, the received airdrops will be sitting idle in the wallet and never gets listed anywhere. In some cases we never receive the rewards. It was during the year 2017-18 where more users turned themselves rich through airdrops. Nowadays the airdrop is being much limited as well as made to be very available for limited number of participants. In some case selected members are availed with rewards. So, expecting big out of airdrops could end-up with disappointment.

I agree with all your opinions from the good side to the bad side,
but as we know from the start we will follow the airdrop and there will definitely be projects that are useless and don't keep promises, even though we have strictly selected,
for me the airdrop is a lucky gift where we only do one job without doing the next or continuous thing, for me as long as I don't spend money providing detailed information following the airdrop it's not a problem

Yes, this has been the issues many years ago, everyone is blaming and pointing at each other, others say that the airdropers are selling it off right away or even those who are in a bounty campaign, as one of the reasons. And there on the other hard, there are groups who says that the early bird investors or even people the project are selling it.

So the whole idea of airdrop has been defeated, and so it's not worth at all this 2022 and maybe in the future.

And I guess this is the total picture of crypto market, to be profitable we should always be the first on line on this hype project on what kind of marketing strategies they are going to pull to advertised their cryptos.

Perhaps, you've heard of airdrops that are given after users do KYC, which happened at Stellar some time ago. I don't know which other projects give free airdrops to their members after they do KYC. As far as I know, if it's an airdrop, we don't need to fill in personal data to get it and just use a personal wallet that we keep for ourselves. And if a project offers something like that, I think it will be safer than joining a project requiring KYC to get the airdrops.

Maybe the airdrops will be better than the others, but still, it's not worth doing because we have to do KYC, which is our personal documents. The prizes won't be very big, and the risks are also bigger, so we have to consider it if we want to join the airdrops. But if we are investors, maybe that was how they were before they joined the project.

You can never see the good side of airdrops now OP, that is what I can say.
I know it was freely given and sometimes by fulfilling a few tasks but the question is if this is really worth spending your time. As you can see, most are saying airdrops are useless and a waste of time, and I really agree with that base on experience.

I won't stop people from participating in airdrops but there is one thing I would say - never expect valuable airdrops anymore nor you can earn a lot from it, unlike 5 years ago.

Yeah, I also experienced those times when an airdrop is worth more than a month of wages and there are lots of them.  There is even a coin project that conduct an airdrop in the Bitcoin community with an equivalent value of 1 BTC per participant. Sadly I failed to participate in the airdrop.  As far as I can recall, airdrop is part of promoting the project since ICO and other crowdfunding things isn't that popular during those times.

But now airdrop is worthless, only a few are worth claiming, and worst, some airdrops even requests KYC to avoid multi-accounting or multiple claims from one person.  I avoided that kind of airdrop because I think the host's purpose is to collect user information to sell in the market.


Yeah airdrop used to be a good way to get free money but now it is just a waste of time since lots of scams airdrop is everywhere.  I can't agree more when you say that even bounties are a waste of time.  Although not all bounty are scams, many of them are giving or paying their participants worthless tokens.


I think it is fine to participate in airdrop, since airdrop only needs a minimal effort to be qualified, just be aware of those who ask for KYC and better avoid them. 

PLus and minus
pros and cons
We must be smart in considering and analyzing those sides.
SOme people may have a different opinions about these, it depends on how their ability to evaluate the airdrops themselves. But, so far, how many airdrops that are really worthy and how many are really shits? I think that most of them are really shits. Although we have analyzed the projects carefully, it will not guarantee if the airdrops are really promising, paying, and also listing. Although they may be worthy, I don't know how the percentage of the worthy and not.

But so far, I think that the era of airdrop has been changing Before 2017, there were probably very worthy, but now? It is like a side of luck and unlucky.

It is true that we may not spend money but we wasted effort and time. Wasting effort and time on useless things should be very annoying, especially when we did it multiple times. This is the reason why I never joined any airdrop again, I think it is only a useless thing. Almost no airdrop can give proper money, most of them are even scams. Instead of following things that aren't clear, it's better to ignore them and follow other things that are more obvious such as the signature campaign paid in BTC.

LOL. Another airdrop related topic. When will you guys realize that they are total waste of time and stop participating in them? Now even bounties and free NFT minting are waste of time, and you guys still hope to get something from airdrops. Testnet, nods are the only one thing left that still can give some money in exchange of time spent.

OP has mentioned that he got nothing after taking part in 10-20 airdrops. Dude, you need to take part in few hundreds if you want to get some few dollar worth tokens. But the problem is, there are no so many airdrops nowadays, so better forget about them.

Most airdrops are not as productive as they used to be. very rarely do I find an airdrop that can pay hunters up to $ 100 or not even reach $ 50. it also depends on the type of airdrop and the success of the project itself.
Several types of airdrops, such as airdrops for share assignments on social media, will get very small rewards and in my opinion, they are no longer worth it.

Some of the most popular airdrops right now are the Running Node incentive airdrops, but require VPS capital or a high-spec computer to run Nodes on projects that do tesnet.

One deterrent is implementing KYC, but are poachers willing to give up their personal information just for an obscure airdrop? of course, I will never do it, unless the project is really good and has good potential for the future. So it is necessary to do research beforehand to find out the potential of the project. Many successful projects in the past that provided lots of rewards didn't apply KYC, even though the rules that were given were very easy. Unlike now, the rules are getting more difficult and the rewards are also getting smaller. Most airdrops also limit how many participants can take part, so that the rewards can be distributed in the same amount and not too small.

Based on my experience, airdrops that require a KYC have a better pay rate but of course, that is if they are legit. This is what they say that when the reward is big, the risk is also greater but if we are knowledgeable and have an experience then we will know if how to differentiate a scam from not but if not, then better to not risk your data at all but do only the airdrops who are KYC free.

For the airdrops that are legit, I think one of the reason on why they require a KYC is to prevent abusers because it is easy for someone to create multiple accounts and enroll on the same airdrop over and over again which are not right. Other people who are fair are sometimes not accommodated anymore because of them.

Those participating in airdrops most especially newbies should have it mind that not all airdrops payments are guaranteed and even those that eventually pays might still not get listed.
I have been participating in airdrops for sometime now and I have received several coins and token and not all of them are tradable.
Though I have been lucky enough to get some decent amount from airdrop but it only happens once in a blue moon.
So if you're thinking of joining an airdrop then don't expect too much from it because if you do you'll only end up been disappointed.

It is not a random distribution they will distribute to all participants and complete the task. It's like you participating in the signature campaign, you have to meet all the requirements that the campaign requires, and you can't get the reward if you don't complete all the tasks correctly. But I have to admit that finding such projects is very difficult and there are many projects that offer difficult tasks, it is not as simple as the old airdrops.
Recently, another new form of airdrop is running testnet nodes, very few participants and bigger rewards than many testnets bring.

Yes, the ugly one. That’s really the thing about airdrops these days. So the other day I was in a telegram group where we work on micro tasks and kee earning few bucks in bitcoin all the time. There might have been big planning behind this but soon channel started publishing various good airdrops. It was all good until we get paid to do that micro task. The logic was we used to get paid for getting referred by single owner. In turn hé earned huge amounts of airdrop and later traded for money.

However, soon we realised that there were airdrops which literally had no projects, no white paper and worst none of them had a simple Website as well.

That pointed out the whole stuff to one thing, they were collecting the data. So it’s always better to use the secondary or temp mails so that to stay away from such scams

Airdrops are actually an opportunity and it's a reward of free tokens but not all of them are worth grabbing. There are lots of airdrops nowadays that would ask us to do different tasks but we'll still end up being unpaid or they will pay us with shitcoins.
Airdrops a few years ago are really worth joining because there were lots of promising projects before that are worth joining. Nowadays, fake and scam airdrops are existing so people are now being skeptical.

I think airdrops doesn't have to be that bad but it doesn't mean we are participating in airdrops for an income.
Airdrops are like incentives for people who are holding certain coins. If a person is filling up forms to receive airdrops then thats bad.
I have received few airdrops in my wallet just like that without filling up any forms which is why I like airdrops.
At the same time there are also some shit tokens lying around in my wallet which makes my wallet look like shit too.
This is one of the reasons why I don't like airdrops. All in all I don't pay much attention to airdrops but if there are some which are worthy then it's good.

I don't think new airdrops require KYC anymore for us to participate. I don't believe on airdrops that requires KYC since it's most likely has no reward or a modus for a potential identity theft. It's not much worth it to sacrifice your identity for some unsure rewards and airdrops today has evolved. Most airdrops today are doing testnets and requiring participants to use their platform. Most of the successful airdrops today requires participants to spend some time and their own money to qualify on the airdrop and I do think that it is logical since airdrops can easily be abused if it's free. The reward is for the real users and I see it fair.

Useful tips but some newbies to the market they don't have too much initial capital and are inexperience so sometimes airdrops or other free ways of making money will be the place for them to start and experience from that. Maybe they will waste time and sometimes lose money because of scam offers as you said but that will also be good for them sometimes. I want newcomers to experience the sweetness of the market as well as the bitterness of the marketplace, which is more practical than listening to others. From there they will draw experience as well as lessons to help them survive in the market.

The important thing is that you can be careful if you want to join airdrops because not all airdrops can provide benefits. Besides that, many airdrops will ask them to do KYC, which is really not worth doing because the rewards we get are not big when we submit documents to them. And we know that doing so is very risky because if our documents fall into the wrong hands, our data can be used by them to deceive.

It should be understood that there are two types of airdrops - for performing tasks in the test network and in the main one. And accordingly, it does not require financial investments only to perform tasks in the test network. As for the Unisawap and Dydx mentioned by you, airdrop was distributed among the early users of these decentralized exchanges.

What you said is true, the airdrop has changed to a new model. Where the participants will need to take the quests more seriously, the quests start getting harder and not everyone is patient enough to complete the quests to get the rewards. The tasks from the testnet process force us to do it every day and always interact with the developers if we want to get a reward and of course, the reward is very valuable unlike spam airdrops. Many people still don't know about the change of airdrop and they think they are still useless.

I'd like to comment on the bad side of airdrops because the bad side made me very choosy on the kind of airdrop that I'm participating in, not all airdrops are created equal, there are good airdrops where you need to just wait and get updates and there are airdrops that are created to collect emails and sensitive information which they sell in the market, airdrops that ask for sensitive information are not worth joining because there's no guaranty if the airdrop will have value in the future while you give away your information that can be used to scam people.

The biggest advice I have for you is that you should quickly try much as possible to start to avoid free stuffs as you progress deeper into cryptocurrency. If you like free things, you will always look out for free things which means that you can easily be enticed by very good offers in the form of free things from scammers who wish to try out a new method. The sooner you accept that free things are dangerous the better for you. There are very few current credible airdrops, more than half are fake, you have to be extra careful, let the love for free stuffs not make you a victim.

in the past there were indeed many airdrops that were worth participating in and got big results, as if we didn't think long about completing KYC, but lately it's rare to find airdrops that get big results, and we are still asked to do KYC, I think it's for work the rules are not difficult, but if you count between us providing personal data and the rewards given, I don't think it's worth it, so now I rarely take part in airdrops

It's okay if they are fraud as long as you don't invest money on them. They are also easy to do and doesn't consume much of our time so I don't really call them a time waster. If we are lucky, the small time that we allocate is also going to be worth it because some airdrops are gems. They can worth a thousand or more dollars.

If we have experience from investing in a project before, we can also use it to search for a more worthy airdrop and not just randomly perform any airdrops that you saw because you are literally gambling that way. Relying totally on airdrops is of course bad but we can find a primary source of income first and then just do some airdrops on our free time.

At least to myself the worst aspect of airdrops is that now many of them ask for your personal information, I remember that when I first came to this market airdrops were already very popular and some of them made a lot of money to whoever that took the time to participate in the airdrop, however eventually the regulations changed and airdrops began asking for you to pass their KYC policies, and to me this is simply too risky as at best you will gain a few dollars in exchange for that information and at worst you will give away your information and receive nothing in return.

Actually, filling-up forms, posting addresses, and following social media, etc. all over again and again is not even a hassle if only those repetitive tasks are worth of user's time. In most cases, even putting effort and dedication into joining airdrops was applied, all those serious work and efforts are nothing because of low rewards, no value coins, or much worst, the actual airdrop didn't happen.

Before, it's no doubt that joining airdrops are profitable that even a project with no appropriate use case, can be hyped.

But as always, a trendy thing always has an end.

I think choosing airdrops that's coming from reputed platform will prevent you from such things and will definitely have higher chance of giving you good returns, moreover there are some coins that is being advertised in their airdrops by some big platform like CMC and binance in which i'm sure they are really legit after all they have gone the review made by the big platform that is binance which i'm sure have some requirements that is quite strict in term of their selection against all these projects that trying to be adverised by the platform.

Airdrop in most cases are not profitable, many use it to phish for emails or members to join a telegram group.  They also use it to support their marketing portfolio so that when someone look at their contacts there are lots of them.  This can be use to attract client.

What worst among the airdrop is they are asking for KYC.  Funny how people fell to this trap and sad that after giving their information they are left hanging waiting for the airdrop that won't arrive.

Those have always been there, there will never be anything positive only in the crypto world. There will definitely be deficiencies or negative sides. Especially if this is related to new project airdrops where this is just like gambling. Maybe some people are very lucky because of the airdrops and get a lot of money. but many are also unlucky and don't get proper money even though they have participated in various types of airdrops. because this airdrops program is like a lucky program. Sometimes we have analyzed the project, and it seems promising and the results are good. but the reality is the opposite and does not mean anything, worthless. However, sometimes airdrops provide quite good rewards. However, from what I have observed and have participated in, the comparison between the results of airdrops that are really worthy and not very far away. many airdrop prgrams return nothing and are a complete waste of time.

Airdrops are a free way that we can do to earn income, and if there is an Airdrop that requires us to send funds, then just be careful. Because this could mean that the Airdrop is an Airdrop scam.  But don't be too exaggerated in doing airdrops. Because there is still way to earn income for free, namely by participating in the bounty program.

Beginners are actually very happy if there is an airdrop project, it will be their first job during the learning phase.  while you don't spend money to follow it, of course it's not a big problem and the work is quite easy and short, there are no tasks that have to be done every day

Always keep your major assets off any wallets you have used to participate in any form of airdrops, you must have connect such wallets to many different type of platforms and dexs, we can't tell which one is safe or not.

Have a separate wallet for storing your assets and another for airdrops.

Back in 2017 when i did my first steps in the crypto market i had a time of a few weeks or months where i joined every airdrop that was available. Even back then there were a lot of airdrops, but in the end i can not really remember of any airdrop that was really worth the effort. So i totally stopped following airdrop sites or telegram channels.
I would imagine that nowadays it is even way worse than back in 2017 and that today there are probably at least a dozen new airdrops of some shit-coins each and everyday popping up that will never have any value.
I made some swaps within metamask in order to qualify for a potential airdrop, but that is the only thing that i did in that regard.
Personally i think that airdrops are not good for the project that are doing it and also for the people that invested into that project that is doing an airdrop because then the telegram channel or discord becomes flooded with thousands of airdrop hunters that are absolutely useless for the project.

Now a days airdrop only using the people for the promotion of their project. They never interested to pay them back with their coins of tokens. Now most of the hunters in forum and in the forum related people was jobless.The airdrop target such people for the free work, the sad part of the game is even some bounty in bitcointalk also repeat the same.So it’s essential to check the past history about the project.

that's right because I very rarely take part in airdrops.
but the airdrop you said (Aptos) is still the same as the airdrop in the past. I mean isn't $50-$100 randomly distributed to members who meet the criteria or qualify only? so it's like a waste if you have done the testnet airdrop task but only selected or random people are given free tokens (meet the requirements)

Yes, I feel this myself, the fact that is happening is that we have to make more effort to make us really pay for participating in the airdrop. But I'm not complaining about this because I didn't spend the slightest capital to do this. You are right now interesting airdrop by running testnet and node. I am a member of several groups and indeed from tesnet and node the prizes are now more attractive.

The bad side always outweight the good side and that’s the trouble. Do not even bother to be part of any bounties or airdrops because if they are giving away their token for free, that means they do not consider it to be valuable at all.

There are two valid options with tokens when you are creating a new project, either do not have them all printed before, so that people would have to either stake or mine them and NOBODY has even a single one at first (the staking could be done somehow with others I don't know, it’s beyond me, or have a very small one) or you could just distribute ALL of it and not have any for the creators, that’s it, no presale or anything, just pure distribution.

The previous years were indeed more productive and there were many new types of airdrops that did pay airdrop hunters. but for now, the airdrop is not always a profitable event or not commensurate with the work being done. Airdrops are currently not easy to do, to get big rewards it takes more effort and that's also very rare. Currently, large airdrops are only obtained on the tasks of running nodes, testnets and the like, so there is more effort to be able to keep up.

I think at this time, it would be tough to know whether a project would be valuable or not because almost everything has been created, but of course, there are a lot of innovative minds in the world that could make something new and have an impact on the planet.

In the previous years, I think it is more beneficial with that, but now it’s not going to be as lucky or effective now. At least that’s what I think.

It’s best to hold a coin that you really want in the work for so that you would not be hesitant or feel that you have wasted your time buying it. 

Recently airdrops have taken a different dimension where participants need to do more than just follow, like, retweet, and share to become eligible.
If you need an airdrop with future value, you will have to get more involved in the projects day to day activities, interact with their network or something to be eligible.
From what i observed, any potential airdrop projects these days now engage participants more, like engaging in their testnet process or do other tasks that involves interacting with the project which IMO opinion is way better than the usual  follow and get worthless airdrop.

I had joined more than 300 airdrops till now, which include testnets, gleam tasks, joining the waitlist through email, etc, but didn't get too many positive sides, Although only one airdrop that you had mentioned about Aptos give me some benefits and others still in vain, and for me, also there are many malicious mails in my email, which I got through airdrops. So, this is a bad side of the airdrops.

Most of the airdrops are frauds, but what is more clear is that it is a waste of time being wasted just for doing airdrops, even though if we pay attention to working on airdrops to get results, it relies on luck, which is the same as gambling, so it's not clear which one will produce, even though we have worked on and conducted research.

We have to value our own time as best we can with the skills we have that are more valuable, so don't always rely on airdrops. It will be a little disappointing if you don't get results in the airdrops you work on.
Do it in a capitalist way, maybe a trade that can increase the chance of profit.

I only have two sides.
Good side: Free
Bad Side: You are expecting.

There are times supporters become hardcore that they want to support an airdrop until they die. Wrong!
Take advantage of them. That's all there is.
You don't need to keep on following them and hyping them up in social media.
Their reasons for making money are different than what you expect. A future. After they claim loads of profits from their airdrops they will soon forget you and so do their project. They won't even care.
All this reasoning is from experience.
So, if there's a chance to sell them for a good amount, do so. It's a limited chance.

There may be a good side to participating in airdrops, but it depends on luck because over the years airdrops have gained a bad reputation because most of them were a waste of time and you get shit coins that you cannot exchange on the exchange platforms, I agree that participation in airdrop tasks does not need any experience, but the search for legit airdrops requires experience, deep research, and great luck. Therefore, instead of airdrops, we can work in bounties in this forum that is managed by a trusted bounty manager without wasting our time on risky work.

So it's not free. You thought it's free because it doesn't include money but for some people time is more precious than the money. Also, you have indicated that most of them only get your information such as email and the other day you it will be raining scam links and ads, the reason is that they already sold your information to other people in exchange for money in other term they make money out of you.

There's actually some good airdrops but expect that most of the airdrops are random shtcoins and teams that would take advantage on you.

Though it can be avoided if thoroughly review the project.

The good side that the OP talks about is non-existent.

These tokens that get distributed in the form of altcoins, they are mostly shitcoins and they get dumped by their advisors before the airdrop hunters are able to dump at all. Hence they are stuck with a huge stash of such coins in their wallet but no market to sell in.

Also because the supply is so abundant after the airdrop has happened and because the use case of that coin is bullshit, the demand for the coin is almost nil. Again this leads to a zero buying market.

Thus only the bad and ugly sides actually exist.

It's quite surprising to me that you don't value your time. You are not investing money, but you must invest your time in order to gain profit from an airdrop. However, you are not valuing your own time. As far as I know, the majority of Airdrops are now scams. Those give out rewards, but the token value is meaningless. It was profitable a long ago. However, airdrop is now solely a waste of time. Instead of Airdrop, we could try something else. It's even not worth the cost of your internet service.

Airdrop actually is having more bad sides rather than good sides. If you are participating in the airdrop and you can only rely with your luck. You can compare how many successful aidrop with failed airdrop. It's easy to avoid the ugly side from the airdrop but agian the result from airdrop actually depend on the various things. People may be lucky enough to get some good things like able to get huge airdrop that worth lots of money but i just wanna try to remind you that if people rarely getting it, Maybe 1 year for 1 legit airdrop.
I have seen bunch of people have been trying hundreds of airdrop and most of them scam. It's up to 97% airdrop were scam. There was a little percentage like 1% from total airdrop refuse to distribute the reward.
Some airdrops were also forcing their users to fill KYC which must be avoided caused by it has potentially to be a scam airdrop that will steal your personal data through airdrop.

Informations are small thing. They won't ask for your pictures (mostly). Mist of the airdrops I've joined simply asked its participants to create an account on their platform and invite friends on their telegram channel (most of the time), also to share news about their project on instagram and such. There are also contests such as fanarts and more. The only thing which is bad on airdrops, are non-paying projects. Even if you didn't lose money, time is important also the effort of participating. But all in all, personally, I've made a decent amount from airdrops before. Nowadays, I think rewards are not as big as with previous years but as long as it is paying, I see no other reason to participate especially to those who are lacking money to invest.

All in all, joining airdrops is okay as long as the airdrops do not require you to fill in complete information about yourself, including sending your personal documents to the projects. That will be too risky to do as we do not know how good the project will be in the future and better to search for the other airdrops if they ask you to fill out the KYC. It is not worth risking yourself by sending them your documents or doing KYC for just a few dollars. Even if the project can explode in the short term, it is still not worth doing KYC.

Looks like you've been missing out on a lot of potential airdrops lately like the latest Uni, Para, DXdy or Aptos. I can say that the form of the airdrop has changed, forms like telegram tasks and spam tasks on social networking platforms like the old bounty campaign are gone, it is replaced by testnet or retroactive. About the reward, I don't know if it's big enough for you but for me getting 2k to 3k for an airdrop is huge for example aptos paid to hunters. These are just the notable projects and there are many more with rewards ranging from $50-100 per campaign.

I was confused about the difference between the bad side and the ugly side because generally, they are all on the negative side.

I was participating in airdrops before last 2016-2017 and I tell you that many participants got their precious rewards which is why it encourage people to join during that time. But after that time and until today when the bear season hits the market, airdrops are useless anymore, many of them are scammy and have no market value. So if we expect we can get any $$$ from joining them, I don't think so.

The downside for me is that sometimes we can miss airdrops that are of good value not because we don't do them, but because we do too many airdrops and don't have enough time to get updates, even though the value you get can be very different in just one day.

doing an airdrop is indeed a very easy and free task without having to spend money to have free tokens. but keep in mind that the airdrop is just a task to fill your free time. don't spend time just doing airdrop tasks. because the results of the airdrop are not necessarily able to meet daily needs and it is better to work in the real world (only a suggestion from me)

actually the purpose of an airdrop like that is to gather many people in one group room so that the group looks active and as an airdropper you have to wait a long time for the distribution of airdrop tokens that are uncertain or may not be paid at all

do not be surprised by such problems. because there are several airdrop scams that aim only to collect emails through Google forms instead of having to fill in for token payments even though there your email is collected and sent an email containing a dangerous zip or malware that causes hacking of your wallet if one day accidentally clicks on it

to research a good airdrop is very difficult. because starting from 2018 I think the airdrop from the telegram bot is just 99% a scam.
and I see that currently there are lots of shitcoin airdrops that distribute free tokens with a large total supply but have no clear purpose and in the end the distributed tokens have no value whatsoever.

if indeed you like to join the airdrop the best way for me is don't sacrifice email, KYC, money just to take part in the airdrop, it will be safer.

Thats normal. Every airdrops has bad side, but this one should be expected as the project might not be sincere or real. Some of them uses the hunters to spread thr goodwill of the project and create buzz bu if its not work up then they will simply abandon it. Thats how a new project usually do since they trying to make community and expand it to more and only will give a valuable drops once it become successful.

All of this requires you big effort and you have to actually use the platform to be eligible to get the airdrop. It's safe to say that this type of airdrops always went big especially if it was from pretty reputable exchanges like Uniswap. It was actually a hot pic on uniswap for people to got decent airdrop from that.

Sure it requires little to no effort. But majority of them are just worth nothing and even if it just takes like few minutes of your life, I would prefer to use my time to something else or participate on something uniswap-airdrop like later if there is any.

Feel like both of them are on bad side so there is nothing to compare about. Do it with your own risk.
If you just want pray with the luckiness of yours to get decent airdrop there without caring about the importance of identity then go for it, but I would recommend to not to do that.

This is already expected because it's really a part of the job. Participating in airdrops is like a game of chance. Before around 2018 I think, airdrops are just very easy to complete, and even how shit the airdrop is there is some value before, it was not really tiring at all if you can get a few bucks on it.
But now, it's already new, very low chance to get an airdrop now but if you are lucky, you can get 1-time big time airdrop.
That's why I am really amazed by those people who are airdrop hunters, they are dedicated to it.

Almost everyone of us have made or search for airdrops and made money with just efforts and time
During my search here are some of the few of the past airdrops that i have participated:
Unisawap, Dydx, Muse, Aptos, others just forget but made a profit from them, some of this you need to make some transactions means you have to either deposit or make some trades using their platform, live or testnet.

What are the good side of doing airdrops?
The good thing about airdrops is even without money , or what we call funds to buy tokens coins or bitcoin you can still have a chance for airdrops by doing small task and only consumes time and also small knowledge although some will post the process to do the task which makes it more easier, and then wait for further announcements from them.

What's the bad side?
Well its not necessary that bad after all since you don't need to put in money just to have airdrops, but if you just participate in an airdrop that's just there to gather mass information of the people joining the airdrop that is just free, you just wasted time and effort, and also you will be just wait for nothing, imagine you have join like for example 10-20 airdrops, fill-ups forms sleeping late is so tiring.

What's the ugly side?
I think this was not a good one after all, since you have fill up forms and use your email etc. for this one, you might get expose, and be in the batch of emails that can received malware links, scam links, that might accidentally click, and be a victims of ransom or any form of crypto or hackers getting your precious funds hard earn money or even your other priceless coins maybe eth bitcoin or any other altcoin.

So even though this airdrops are profitable for other people, there is still some downsides that we should always look into, so make sure  research about the projects, if they were really legit, so that there is not wasted time and efforts because we don't know what are really there purpose.

Hope this will help newbies like me to be careful and also enjoy doing this frees tuff without compromising other assets
best way is to ask also in this group because as i ready through other comments they are really helpful and explain everything to others, that's what i like about bitcointalk, information is overflowing, you just have to read and ask.