Suggestion of a measure to avoid abandoned bounties

Question

I see too many posts with bounties being abandoned on our site. Bounties are an efficient attention-getter device which does well to attract answers to the post. If the post is abandoned, this seems unfair to the people who invested their time in answering it.

My idea is inspired by the fact that if a poster accepts someone else's answer he gets +2 rep (link), which encourages acceptation. I would suggest a similar bonus for awarding bounties.

As +2 rep is a paltry amount when compared with bounties that are usually in the range of 50-200. My idea is that for a bounty being awarded by its poster (not the community), to refund the bounty-poster with something like 20 percent of his bounty. This is a positive type of encouragement which hurts no one.

To motivate bounty posters to return and indicate why the proposed answers didn't work for them, perhaps this award should also apply if they post an answer of their own during the 7+1 days bounty period.

Please indicate your opinion of my suggestion or your ideas for improvement.

Edit : Conclusion

We today have 63,676 unanswered questions, almost all abandoned, and the above +2 rep rule is too little to be effective.

I thought that because bounties are much more substantial there would be a numerical argument to offer a more effective incentive, including channeling back some of the reputation, but I didn't manage to start any brainstorming about the subject.

It has been suggested that meta.SE is more suitable for such a discussion, but in view of the evidenced inertia I don't think I'll bother.

Thanks to every one who participated.

Answer 1

I don't think the collection of fake internet points is the main driver here.

A lot of questions with reasonably good answers are abandoned without being accepted, regardless if a bounty is set or not. The user has had their issue solved, if they don't want to interact further with the community then you can't force the issue.

Additionally your suggestion only works if the questioner is the one that set the bounty. What do you propose occurs if a 3rd party adds the bounty to the question?

Answer 2

I see too many posts with bounties being abandoned on our site. Bounties are an efficient attention-getter device which does well to attract answers to the post. If the post is abandoned, this seems unfair to the people who invested their time in answering it.

Any user who offers a bounty is not required to award it. I often use a bounty to draw attention to a question, and purposefully do not award the bounty to anyone, for the sole purpose of allowing the community to decide which answer should get it.

I cannot agree that by simply not awarding a bounty, that I have abandoned the bounty.

As +2 rep is a paltry amount when compared with bounties that are usually in the range of 50-200. My idea is that for a bounty being awarded by its poster (not the community), to refund the bounty-poster with something like 20 percent of his bounty. This is a positive type of encouragement which hurts no one.

Except I think the behavior of only answering questions with a bounty is harmful to the community. Bounties should remain non-refundable, the entire point of a bounty, is to draw attention to the question and its answers and if none exist hopefully encourage somebody to post one.

I personally think bounties shouldn't be awarded at all. They should simply be a way to draw attention to good quality contributions. This would get rid of what I believe is a negative motivation for answering a question. It would also solve the problem of "abandoned" bounties. If the answer that is submitted due to bounty answers the question, it should be accepted, which should happen in our current environment anyways.

Answer 3

Please indicate your opinion of my suggestion

Bounties are intended to draw attention to a post:

If you’ve asked a good question, edited it with status and progress updates, and still are not receiving answers, you can draw attention to your question by placing a bounty on it.

...

Part of what you’re “paying for” with the bounty is to get additional attention for your question, over and beyond what a normal question gets. In that regard, a bounty does not guarantee a response

Source What is a bounty? How can I start one? - Help Center - Super User

There is no compulsion to award a bounty. That is up to the discretion of the user who placed the bounty.

If they feel that no answer deserves the bounty that is their choice and we should respect it.

You are not doing a service to the people who offered a solution, believing that they were getting a bounty for the effort. And I myself don't see a bounty as "please have a look" but as "please help".

Source comment by harrymc

Users should not "believe they are getting a bounty for their effort", as that is not specified in the rules for awarding bounties.

If that was the case, then everyone answering the bountied question would expect the bounty and that is clearly not the case.

You should consider it a bonus if you actually get awarded the bounty.

Nobody is forcing you to spend your valuable time answering questions that have bounties.

Answer 4

“Bounties are an efficient attention-getter device which does well to attract answers to the post.”

Yes, and as someone who has tossed a lot of my rep towards bounties on questions that still don’t get answered, the implication here is that the community is lazy and can only be motivated by bounties. So we should now come up with some wacky math to reward participants.

Sometimes this is the case. Other times, questions are asked that can in no way get an answer… At least not in the immediate timeframe.

I don’t believe people should rewarded a percentage just for posting an answer on a bounty-based question. If the original poster—who most of the time posts the bounty—does not see that answer as valid, they should not worry about their bounty being shaved away just by participation.

The other side of this coin is another fact about bounties: If a bountied question gets a real answer that has real value guess what? That question—and resulting answer—gets upvoted so much that the investment in the bounty is rewarded with an evergreen pile of upvotes.

I think bounties are fine as they are: A gamble. Sometimes the added attention creates quality. Sometimes it ends up doing nothing at all. I’m fine with the system being the way it is.