What about a scenario where a project after requesting for such payment from participants actually airdropped but to just about 15% of their participants out of a 100% that made that TON payment task. Can that still be regarded as some form of scam? since the notion has been that most of these airdrops that request some fee to be paid don't usually fulfill their promise.
That's outright scamming, If you set the rule on how participants will qualify for the airdrop and you did not fulfill the promise, then people will lose trust on your project.
I like what you said about rule setting and that just hits the nail on the head, because what is worth doing is worth doing well and it doesn't make sense paying a fraction of a total participants just not to make it seem as though they didn't share the airdrop at last not to be labelled outrightly as scam. Whereas they have gotten a huge profit from the millions of participants that paid that money. I think some of these projects are the ones that later makes up the logs of pump and dump shitcoins we see in the crypto space.