Airdrops have not given users or testers what they wanted lately. The fact that the market is red has a big impact. The other reason is that Airdrops really give a feeling of saturation in the market because there are L2 projects and testnets everywhere. Since many people are flocking there due to the excess demand, I think the desired profits are not being made, at least not as before.
so many projects also aren't transparent with their eligibility criteria which I presume is intentional so to avoid backlash and also they probably like to pull some string behind scene and don't want people to find out.
It's called retrospective airdrop for a reason (i.e, not having eligibility criteria revealed beforehand).
Airdrops have been long been like that since $UNI airdrop back in 2020, not giving eligibility criteria beforehand was one of major cause of airdrops being worth a lot, otherwise everyone would be farming the criteria and diluting the airdrop.
...And I don't think projects can be blamed here, projects (at least genuine ones) are trying to avoid giving farmers piece of pie, and it's legit hard to filter genuine users amongst those who are good at faking that they are genuine users.
I don't even know what we are supposed to blame them for? Not giving everyone free money? I understand the purpose of announcing those airdrops beforehand as they get more eyes to them and maybe try their system if that's a requirement for getting part of that airdrop, but imho it doesn't make any sense. It just invites bots to the party, and literally everyone new will be there to dump that free token.
Rewarding retrospectively is the only way that makes sense. And because those users get rewarded just because they were fans and using it anyway, it gives them incentive to spread the word. And when the time of airdrop comes and makes few people rich, every news site will mention about that project, because that's news that people want to hear about. So it's basically free press that has only good vibes written all over it.
