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!"
What I meant to say is that they're literal in the sense that they talk about qualities (be them figurative or otherwise), whilst this puzzle actually talks more about the components of the words [i.e. sounds and letters]
Look at the almost complete solution to my puzzle ;)
(funnily enough, it's the one with the least votes)
I just try to reason my way through things - the thing I said yesterday about being really harsh about amateur internet horror fiction? it's because when something (whether it's a story or a puzzle) is missing some necessary piece of logic, the whole thing falls apart
a good puzzle is a number of interlocking pieces, none of which feel arbitrary because they all contribute something toward that aha! moment of getting the answer
PS - I'm still waking up, please go easy on me if these sentences sound like nonsense.
@Alconja then just tell 'em to post an answer & you'll award it a bounty.
He seems to be saying here that the rep fraud is not the real issue and that the real issue is with implementation (I don't know how separate the sites are programmatically). Furthermore, you have made it perfectly clear that you want to leave it to those who do understand that (the developers). Is he a SE developer? I think we really need to ask, "How can we get the information we need to investigate the 'buggy to car' planning, since we now really do exist outside of beta".
@question_asker which one, the numbers or the character strings?
@manshu right. I get his point about "buggy to car" type feature requests. But the fact is puzzling and code-golf are fully fledged SE sites, not imagined or even beta ones.
@Alconja FWIW I posted a comment in the meta post to request useful input on that matter
...because what's the point of having a discussion on our meta without knowing exactly what we need to consider?
but in terms of being a moderator, sitting in chat is not really doing anything that would make me think "it's important to let this person know about this thing"
especially considering—and this is crucial—these are people who demonstrably don't care what the community wants and have gone out of their way to avoid any kind of transparency, acting only out of caprice and with no accountability to the community
I mentioned this yesterday, but we get all kinds of people who don't participate in our site almost at all talking in our meta about policy
and that drives me nuts, because... I dunno, this should be obvious. People from outside the community shouldn't be dictating policy any more than your neighbor should be ordering you around inside your own house.
