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I've heard the good time about Airdrops. I have this doubt in my mind because I actually lookup on twitter of an airdrop I just did, a lot of the tweets were made by new accounts(no followers/followed account, even no profile picture; all their feeds are airdrop required template tweets). To me it's just sketchy, like ppl now dont bother to get to know the project before they do airdrops. And on another side, the projects are giving less and less because the social media boost from fake/new account isn't working out for them(This is only my assumption though).
All I can tell you is that your suspicions are very close to reality. Few years back I was also on this hype train of constant airdrops, feeding the buzz in social networks, telegram channels and ads. And where I was focused on participation in good, promising projects with great opportunity ahead, there nothing of actual value came out of it. Like seriously, I have an ether wallet filled with jokes, nonsense and money grabs. Around 20 tokens worth a dollar combined... Feels like a awful waste of time and resource now.
If today stuff is all the same as before, there is no doubt that this is not worth the trouble.