What everyone gets wrong about airdrop farmers

Airdrops always end in chaos.

We’ve all been conditioned to expect free money for doing low-value effort.

Projects know and feed into that greed, but it leads to a toxic situation whenever a checker is released:

‘Loyal’ community members sending death threats to the team because they didn’t get the allocation they expected.

This was the real situation that @icobeast referenced when he said that airdrop farmers are the “single worst possible foundation for a community”.

Airdrop farmers are the single worst possible foundation for a community (except for maybe 'gaming' airdrop farmers)

They're all mercenary gaslighters who will literally turn the barrel around on you the *instant* you suggest that they'll get less than they think they deserve

are airdrops the right mechanism for long term sentiment and success?

Farming is part of human nature

Everything can be exploited, will be exploited.

This was the key takeaway I had from @alachacolate’s piece on Sybil farming.

Quoting from the article:

we were somewhat cognizant of the potential backlash of requiring face scans, but we vastly underestimated the lengths people would take to farm this reward what we saw was that individuals were setting up wallets for themselves, their parents, siblings, children, friends, neighbors, and anyone else they knew so they could get unique face scans and collect the $25 deposit. we ended up shutting down the promotion within 12 hours because of the sheer magnitude of people that were manipulating the system to farm the reward

This goes beyond crypto and is apparent in my country too:

Whenever there’s a promotion that gives money or credits freely, we will look to exploit it for maximal gains.

We had this entire ‘saga’ from a fintech company where the incentives were exploited until it became unsustainable to continue running the campaign.

“Never underestimate the lengths people will go to for free money”.

If the time and effort cost is low, the campaign will be exploited.

It is human nature for us to extract anything we see as a quick win.

Some projects know full well about this, but they still choose to lean into this behaviour:

Projects brought this upon themselves

The mainstream crypto marketing playbook is boring.

Some projects know that no one would use their product, so they lean into hype marketing to attract users.

They think that the only way to attract users is with a token, and their campaign is basically:

Some projects used vague terms to hype up their token so users (and their family of wallets) would flock over. While others would beg us to farm them by actively shilling their token.

This made us conditioned to think that we will receive airdrops just by completing simple tasks (me included).

It's true, the entitled group of airdrop farmers who think they deserve six figs for saying "gm" in discord are not your community.

But the teams are usually just as much to blame.

If you run campaigns that attract these sybil groups (galxe quests, incentivized testnets)

Projects choose this easy way to inflate their metrics and get funding from VCs.

The marketing campaigns all involve hinting at throwing free money at users, so they’re incentivised to use the product even if they hate it.

But then, these projects turn back on the users who inflated their metrics and labelled them as ineligible.

It doesn’t help that these projects gave derogatory names that fuelled the flame:

I understand where they come from, but they were basically digging their graves by triggering farmers more.

People aren’t the problem.

Projects that intentionally lean on airdrop hype and ‘participation metrics’ and then turn around and mock the same users… that’s the problem.

This space made us expect rewards for low-value tasks, but that is no longer possible.

The competition is getting harder because of Sybils that aim to exploit these ‘free money mechanics’.

Projects can choose to do either of these options:

  1. Completely eliminate all low-value tasks from their eligibility criteria
  2. Reward both Sybils and humans, which dilutes the entire pool

Projects are guilty of farming us to inflate their metrics, and there’s no denying that fact.

But that’s because of misaligned incentives, where they reward actions that give them short-term hype instead of long-term retention.

Let’s go back to the Scroll airdrop. Just after Starknet announced its allocation to GitHub contributions:

KOLs started telling their followers to make contributions to Scroll’s GitHub.

recently some airdrop hunting accounts shared the scroll github repos with a “farming guide”. please don’t submit a GitHub issue just for farming purposes.

overnight, we have received 600+ low quality submissions that we have to divert resources to parse through.

KOLs know that they get the most engagement for shilling a $0 airdrop task.

There’s a wider pool of audience that is interested in free airdrops

Who wouldn’t want to earn money with just a few clicks of a button and no capital cost?

The standard “POTENTIAL = $10,000 COST = $0” threads fuel unrealistic expectations for a project’s airdrop.

When there’s absolutely no guarantee, but these accounts will lean into the hype for views.

Due to legal reasons, some projects can’t call out these threads and manage expectations, which makes matters worse.

It is fine to be disappointed, but it is not ok to be toxic when things don’t go your way.

The entire ‘community’ turns on you.

Quoting from @advaith’s experience with farmers after the Succinct airdrop, this was what the team experienced:

This is the kind of behaviour that should not be condoned.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money from airdrops, because that’s everyone’s goal.

But how we react to not getting the allocation we expect is the key defining characteristic of an airdrop farmer:

Airdrop farmers are entitled

@icobeast received a lot of hate for calling out airdrop farmers when he’s an ‘airdrop farmer’ himself with Blast, Virtuals, and even Kaito.

There is no denying that we are all here to make money. But there are toxic and non-toxic ways to make money here.

Which is why there’s a key difference between an airdrop farmer and an airdrop hunter:

An airdrop farmer has an entitled mindset.

To all the airdrop farmers out there,

The allocation you imagined is not the allocation you get.

So stop fudding projects just because you thought they'll give you 5 figs.

Appreciate how easy it still is to make money in Web3.

The worst part about airdrop farmers is the entitlement.

also Problematic that teams have to spend time on TGE planning around mitigating the amount of harm farmers dumping your token will cause to the actual community.

CT has conditioned us to think that we deserve rewards.

We set an expectation on how much we’ll receive from an airdrop, because KOLs and projects hype up the campaign.

And when the reality doesn’t meet these expectations, the space becomes toxic.

Yep i’ve stood by this perspective for a long time

if you set expectations high and reality is low you get this.

It is fine to be disappointed, but it is not ok to be toxic when things don’t go your way.

You can say all you want about me having the ‘moral high ground’ and that I’m a hypocrite because I’m farming airdrops.

But once again, the entitled mindset is what makes the difference between an airdrop farmer and an airdrop hunter.

We are all here to make money, but there is no need to be emotional over outcomes that we can’t control.

I will receive a lot of hate for this post, but so be it.

Being overly emotional clouds judgment, and that’s why I’m doing my best to detach from the outcome.

I am not perfect at this either and will get frustrated at some allocations, but again, there is no need to mock or be toxic towards a project.

The sooner you realise this, the better:

Time and effort no longer matter

Many see airdrops as a job, where the more hours you put in, the more rewards you get.

That is true for some airdrops, but it’s not always the case:

The amount of time you put in is not proportional to the rewards you earn, especially if you’re doing low-value tasks.

If your strategy involves spamming plenty of low-value tasks, then it needs a serious rethink.

The amount of time you put in is not proportional to the rewards you earn, especially if you’re doing low-value tasks.

Airdrops are a value transfer where you have to give value first to get the airdrop back.

Of course, everyone would claim that their contributions are valuable.

The question you need to ask yourself:

How am I providing real value to the project with my contributions?

We can choose to use projects that we care about.

The ones we genuinely enjoy using and can even make a profit with, instead of actively grinding projects that we hate to get tokens that we want to dump immediately.

It’s impossible to do the same low-value actions that worked before and expect the same result today.

Projects choose to reward actions that give them short-term hype instead of long-term retention.