1) They made a scrypt to check signatures and posts. They use automatic payout with the bot. They designed smart rules.
That's quite easy to do; almost trivial.
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There are lots of shady things about the project, but it's free. There's tons of bad ICO that actually collect money from investors and walk away
Classic
relative privation fallacy (aka, "not as bad as" fallacy), which is not an actual argument that goes in favor of the project.
In terms of logic my argument is flawed, I agree. But what I see is you picking 1 project and judge it with some heavy criteria. Make a thread and put GOOD projects there, it will be a really small number of projects, all other are shitcoins (that's true, but they still hold the value. If DeepOnion is scam to make devs rich, what about other greedy coins out there? MUCH MORE greedy.
My point is that among all shitcoin releases (and airdrops), DeepOnion is really good. Yes, it's far from perfect. But it doesn't ask for money like 95% or recent projects.
Is ETH a scam? It's a premine project. Yes, we can see a real development, but the development is not instant. Byteball? Yes, the airdrop model is good, but it also has multiple flaws.