@Alconja if you want me to take something seriously, start by taking it seriously yourself.
This may not be particularly important to you, but it's still my job to at least consider the request and think about its implications.
If you're not willing to do that, ok, then don't. But once you hit the point where you're ignoring my concerns and ... essentially just saying, "come oooooon" to every hesitation, that's getting pretty rude.
As for what bounties on meta are for... They're essentially an expensive way of bumping a post you don't want to edit or answer:
Bounties aren't even a particularly great way to get attention on MSO (the only meta where they're available). They're nice for the occasional contest, but there are better ways of getting attention:
Writing a clear, attention-grabbing title can encourage folks to click through
Making sure post...
@Shog9 sorry on mobile now, so responding will be.. clunky
@Shog9 isn't that what I did? Bump a post I didn't want to edit or answer? I felt like it was a) a good feature request, and b) wanted to reignite the conversation given PSE graduated.
And sorry if you feel like I'm not addressing your concerns, maybe I'm just missing something... You seem to be arguing generally about bounties, as opposed to any additional issues caused by bounties on questions...
Let's say you want to reward Deus's answer, or give him rep, or just burn your rep in a big pile for the sheer delight of it. How do bounties let you further this goal?
"quick" here is relative; it takes at least one day to complete the transfer, longer if you have to wait to offer the bounty in the first place (48-hour waiting period after question is asked).
so you start out by offering the bounty. You pick an amount, choose a reason, write some explanatory text...
Then you gotta wait 24 hours, during which time the question can't be closed and sits in the Featured list on the front page of the site and in various tags.
It's also listed in your profile
Assuming you don't forget, you come back and pick an answer to award the bounty to.
For the basic case, there's at least a day during which you're essentially promoting a question and any answers, as well as advertising the fact that you like the question and/or answer and are backing that up with your rep.
This serves a few different purposes.
#1, it actually makes bounties useful
that is, if you want to attract answers to a question, driving a whole bunch of attention to the question works in your favor
So for normal sites where getting answers is... A Big Deal... bounties have this really important role, above the nasty little details of rep-transferring.
Point is, keeps folks honest. Bounties require much less moderation, much less rules and restrictions, simply because so few people have bothered trying crap like that.
so you wanna see a great question about... I donno... You wanna see a puzzle involving horses. Maybe horses that aren't made of meat. You're not sure how this would work out, but you're pretty sure there's something there.
How do you envision offering a bounty that motivates this?
@Alconja keep in mind, you're offering reputation that has no intrinsic value. It's a token economy. You can't spend it except by offering bounties; you can "use" it to help moderate the site, but that doesn't really spend it.
Being the rep-richest person on a dying site means no more than having all the gold on a desert island.
...I get that you clearly don't like the idea personally, but I don't understand the downside, when clearly (this community at least) can see the upside
You can just toss it up and get a week's worth of advertising for like 50 rep
Heck, folks've used that on their own questions before because it tends to net them so many eyeballs that they make out like bandits from the votes even with the bounty amount subtracted.
That's the reason for one of those other restrictions I glossed over up above: you have to increase the offer for every subsequent bounty on a question.
Sure, (and you're highlighting again how little difference there is with bounties on answers), but that goes against the design and gives the rep to the answer, not the asker who I wanted to reward
@Alconja on any other site? Absolutely not. This is, as I've noted once or twice already, a terrible idea on sites that aren't Puzzling (or maybe Code Golf).
But, it wouldn't be the weirdest thing y'all have done
Not the point though really. This is a thought experiment
Ignoring that it's a weird perversion of the system (because this entire site is a weird perversion of the system), how would self-answer + bounty not fulfill your goals?
@Alconja here, arguably, the only thing of value is the questions. You could have puzzle-authors self-answer and be done with it, but that'd be less fun. So there's a certain logic for inverting the reputation system.
On a normal Q&A site, chewing up valuable advertising space with questions that no one wants to see (much less reward!) more/better answers to is... Not gonna be healthy.
Sure. And if it can't be done on a per site basis, it might be not worth pursuing.. Though again, I can't see the downside, on other sites, will likely just not get used.
But this is why it's just a feature request (not a demand or a threat). This community sees value in it, and so we're going to the powers that be, with hat in hand saying, "how about this idea?"
I thought the existing "pro question bounty" post did a reasonable job of articulating the argument/need... I'll take another look tomorrow, and maybe post my own "answer" with more detail..
they don't have a blanket policy deeming answers to be spoilers though
spoilers are plot details, character names, things that might be irrelevant depending on context... Not literally anything that actually answers the question.
I mean, you have a site dedicated to hiding answers so that readers can have the fun of figuring it out for themselves.
Q&A sites hiding answers was the thing that motivated the very creation of Stack Exchange
@Alconja except... It doesn't reward any answer. It doesn't even offer the chance of rewarding an existing answer. It's like you're hosting the olympics and asking folks to show up so that they can watch you give all the medals to the host country.
"Hey, come run this race and lose!"
"Guaranteed last-place finish for all and sundry!"
Bounties aren't even a particularly great way to get attention on MSO (the only meta where they're available). They're nice for the occasional contest, but there are better ways of getting attention:
Writing a clear, attention-grabbing title can encourage folks to click through
Making sure post...
Puzzles Etc.
Puzzles Etc.