I suggest don't believe the hype

Agreed, in my opinion ICO hype has a point of distracting users from weak points of the ICO project, but sometimes it really is about people getting extremely interested. In other words natural hype is a good sign.
Yes, but sometimes paid hype is difficult to distinct from natural.
I would question that. Yoiu can always tell if some community is live, stream of new users is steady, people are active and interacting with each other, see for user behavior patterns... Very difficult to fake. I've seen some fake communities and usually it's very easy to figure out.
I don't know exactly how much it's diffucult, but I've heard some rumors about Trump and I guess you've heard about PR technologies