Suppose A answers question Q with a clever answer. Then, to gain more reputation, A starts a bounty  for 50 points on Q with the expectation (it's a gamble) that the extra attention will collect at least 5 upvotes for A's answer.  A can't award the bounty to his or her own answer, of course, but still comes out with more reputation (assuming that the extra attention was effective in collecting at least 5 votes).  On one hand, if the answer is good, then it's nice that the answer (and other answers that may get provided) and the question get more attention.  On the other hand, this seems like reputation gaming, and a bit sketchy.  More importantly, it means that starting a bounty can cause a net gain in reputation for the bounty starter, meaning that there's incentive for every answerer (with confidence in the quality of their answer) to do this, thus lowering the value of the bounty system (since so many questions would receive bounties).  Has this been addressed somehow?  Should it be?  Notes:   I haven't actually observed this anywhere, but I haven't looked for it either.
121024
I say "hack" in the most favorable light. It's a clever idea and theoretically beneficial.  I noticed that an old question of mine suddenly started getting a lot of renewed attention. The question had been answered, with an answer accepted. But another user added a well reasoned and insightful answer to the list. He also opened a +100 bounty on that question.  The resulting increased attention quickly got his answer quite a lot of up-votes. Well more than the 100 points he had spent on the bounty. Therefore, he gets a net rep profit out of the transaction.  So here's the hack:   Find an interesting question Research and provide a very good answer Open up a bounty on that question to attract attention and votes to your new answer Profit!!!   2 and 3 may be out of order--I didn't see the timing of it. But either way, assuming he gets more than 10 votes, he still gets increased rep out of the deal.  I don't think this is necessarily bad for SO - it does generate some useful discussion and insightful answers. Plus you can increase your own rep very rapidly by making your answers highly visible, and therefore frequently voted upon.   However, it does slightly change the meaning and purpose of bounties away from starting a discussion and toward self-promotion. Still, interesting.
5345
My rep went over 2,000 today which meant I could edit other people's posts. Great! Then I added a bounty to a previous question, which brought me back down to 1,984...and I can no longer edit other posts. Should this changed? Or is this ideal?
106458
Are you influenced by existing votes? That is, if a question or answer has a large number of up votes, are you more likely to vote it up (and similar for down)?  The reason I'm putting this question is this: on these sites we see how other people vote before we do. This almost certainly influences us (see resources, below) - just as we can be influenced by our  (people often naturally pick the busy one).  This trend may also be further influenced by rep - do we give more weight to the answer of someone with 10K rep than someone with 10 - even if they both have e.g. zero votes?  And if this does happen, is it even a problem?  I'm not looking here for solutions - right now I'm just curious as to whether this is something you recognise.  Clarification edit: I'm referring to voting here. Example: if you see a question or answer with 20 plus votes, are you more likely to vote it up than if it has no votes, or a negative number vote?  Bounty: I've been so impressed at the quality of answers and comments here that I'm offering a small bounty to encourage more great responses and discussion.  Wrapped up: Bounty awarded to the answer that received the most votes. In light of the question, it only seemed appropriate...  Resources:
27689
Consider this question on .  I put out a 200 bounty on the question, but did not get an answer from anyone other than myself that worked.    In fact, my answer is also the highest up-voted on it at this point.  I know that allowing OP's to retract a bounty can be a slippery slope; in fact I think that once the bounty is put up it should stay up.  But why not allow the OP to answer their own questions with a bounty and reward it to them if they receive the same up-votes as others?  Yes, I am fully aware that bounties are a risk.  People will use them for numerous reasons such as trying to draw extra attention to their issues.  However, in my specific question, the only valid answer is the one that I gave.  Had it been anyone else's question, I would have received the bounty, but since it was my own I did not.
93259
Six days ago I put a +50 bounty on  which wasn't asked by me, but to which I'd previously posted a pretty decent answer. Since then I've earned 130 reputation from upvotes on my answer, netting me +80 reputation and a bronze badge from no work.  It seems possible to slowly generate free reputation by "investing" in your answers like this. I expect I could repeat this perpetually and continue to profit from it.  This strikes me as an abuse of the bounty system. Should anything be done to prevent it?  EDIT: For more concrete questions:   If I put another bounty on this question after this one expired, would that be considered abuse? What if I did it several times? ( the answer was  "yes", but the author was doing so to promote his own project.) What if I didn't do it to the same question, but was constantly promoting questions I'd answered, in order to promote my answers?
50794
This was a question I originally intended to ask before .  According to , paying for a bounty will actually reduce your reputation cap. I searched more recent posts, but the majority of posts that deal with both reputation caps and bounty are about the reputation you earn from the bounty, not that lost from payment. Is this accurate to what actually occurs?  My main concerns draw from the following pool of questions.   Does paying a bounty actually reduce the reputation cap still? After paying a bounty, am I considered to "reach" the reputation cap after getting 200 reputation worth of upvotes, or getting a net daily gain of +200 reputation from upvotes? After paying a bounty, am I considered to "exceed" the reputation cap after getting over 200 reputation from non-bounty sources, or getting a net daily gain of over +200 reputation from non-bounty sources? Can tactical bounty assignment be used to aid in avoiding the criteria for certain cap-related badges?   There were a few other questions I figured, but they could all be derived from the answers to the above questions.
20298
There are a few variables here that I was thinking about:   Spend rep to extend a bounty for a certain amount of time Allow the rep spent to extend duration to add into the original bounty Create minimums on the amount necessary to extend dependent on how long it has been up   These are just ideas and can be tweaked as necessary, but the idea in whole is to encourage people to spend more on rep and avoid "wasted" rep because there wasn't a good answer to a question while minimizing the amount of possible abuse. This was part of the idea to spend a small amount of rep to extend duration without adding to the rep so that you wouldn't have to spend the whole amount over again for a couple more days.  The typical use case that I am thinking of is when you create a bounty and it still gets no attention. I think it would be cool if you could then add onto it to turn it into a higher bounty instead of having those points completely gone.  Possible abuses:   Keeping bounty questions alive for inappropriately long times. There is already an answer but the author does not want to award the bounty.   For 1, you can resolve this by increasing the amount necessary to keep a question alive exponentially similar to what is already in place. You could also halve the amount of extended duration per extension. For 2, this is a problem with the existing system as well, but the author does not have a positive incentive not to award the points since he himself still cannot get them back.
73574
This request was triggered by the very recent blog post , which announced that now, also retroactively, the askers are given as many reputation points (10) as the answerers for each upvote. This does reward the askers, but also takes away from the answerers by diminishing their relative standing. As an arguably extreme example, suppose that Alice has earned a reputation of 1000 points entirely by answering, and Bob has earned a reputation of 600 points entirely by asking; then now Alice will still have 1000 points, while Bob will move ahead of her, now with 1200 points.   Apparently for reasons like that, the mentioned blog post has generated some angry comments (as well as approving ones).   In a comment at , Frank Conijn suggested to      "split the reputation into one for questions and one for answers. Yes indeed, a two-figure reputation."    This seems to be quite a reasonable suggestion, with no apparent downsides. At least two upsides: it will     be more informative;  make the dispute between relative merits of asking and answering completely unnecessary.    A  was asked 10 years ago, which now seems to have acquired new relevance. Most of the objections there were about, again, relative merits of asking and answering, which do not seem relevant.   The only objection there of another kind was this:      "You can't really do it because you can earn a whole bunch of upvotes after you hit the daily rep cap. So any split like this could be really misleading."    I honestly do not understand at all what this problem with the cap is. Whatever it may be, can't it be solved by using caps separately for questions and answers rep points? Or by abolishing the cap altogether?     Added in response to comments and the answer by Glorfindel:  (i) About privileges, we can just use the total, as is done now.   (ii) I cannot imagine that having two numbers, instead of one, can be considered a "mental load". That would be more informative, though. The suggestion by Liam Morris - Reinstate Monica, to have the two numbers only in the profile information, also seems good.   (iii) Edits to questions, as well as to tag wikis/excerpts (which concern tagging questions), would add to the Q rep. Edits to answers would add to the A rep.   (iv) For bounty, it may be left to the users, where to take their points from.     Remark: My question is not a duplicate of , despite the title there. Indeed, that question is actually about a very different matter: namely, whether bugs, feature requests, and discussion eventually get reviewed by a moderator.
70578
I had  in the close review queue. It clearly shows the question with a bounty, but bountied questions cannot be closed. Either bounty questions shouldn't be used as audits, or don't display the bounty notice.    This is the same problem , except it's happening in the close queue rather than reopen.
27023
I have  with a bounty that will expire in a few days. It looks like nobody will get the bounty; only one answer was posted during the bounty period, and it has no upvotes.  In cases like this, the bounty is thrown away.  Why isn't it refunded instead, if no answerer has earned it?
37044
I think   and  may reveal a bug in the bounty system.  The timeline summary as I see it is:   Question asked Mar 17 Answer added Mar 18 Question edited (extended) and bounty added Mar 20  Answer edited and accepted Mar 21 Bounty ends "with no winning answer" Mar 28   This was the only answer to the question.  From      If the bounty starter accepted an answer during the bounty period, that answer is awarded the bounty.   This appears to be the case here, so I'd expect the bounty to be awarded.  Is this a bug in the bounty system?  I'm not too fussed about the actual bounty here (I'd answered the question before the bounty was offered anyway), it's just that it'd be good to either fix the bug or improve the documentation I guess.
63455
How is this possible that the user with  question only has that little reputation? I've checked his site and he doesn't have a lot of downvotes or bounties.
45891
Okay, I may as well mention straight off that the main reason I am asking this question is due to the upcoming reputation recalc.  It has always seemed silly to me how bounties affect privileges. After all, if rep is, as oft repeated, primarily a way of how much the system trusts you, bounties really shouldn't affect that. In terms of effects, this would lessen the pain from the rep recalc. One downside - this increase the number of bounties given out as users wouldn't be saving up their rep to gain privileges, so maybe it would be sensible to enforce a minimum reputation (500?) before you can post bounties.  PS. If people are worried about others gaming the system, the better way would probably be to make the extra reputation gained from bounties not count towards privileges, rather than removing privileges for posting bounties.
83801
I have 78 reputation and  is eligible for bounty 2 days ago. Yet I cannot offer a bounty on my question.    It appears that because I have an answer on my question, the system requires me to offer a minimum bounty of 100. But since my answer is already deleted, what can I do to offer a bounty on my question now?
12170
I am not sure if it is correct to post this on the general Meta of StackExchange, but I encountered a strange thing on Security.  There is this  where a user offers a 100 bounty but only has a reputation of 23.  Now according to  this should not be possible as ...     You must have at least 75 reputation to start a bounty, and at least as much reputation as the bounty amount.   which is certainly not true in this case. Is this a bug?
104374
I would like to ask a question on SO. However, a search reveals that a similar question has been asked, and I feel my question would get marked as a duplicate. The similar question has few answers - one of which is the accepted answer; and this answer is not the one I am looking for (i.e. it's a strategy change rather than a real solution to the answer).  I am very motivated to get an answer to this question - and thus would like to drive forward responses; possibly by offering a decent sized bounty.  Should I simply ask my question, or is it possible to get "ownership" of the similar question?
2824
I think more reputation points should be required to add a new answer than to upvote an existing answer.  I don't continually watch for new questions, so usually when I find a question it has already been answered.  It seems bit inappropriate to answer an already-answered question in order to contribute to the conversation, but until you earn reputation, you can't upvote or comment; you can only add new answers, which prevents me from contributing at the moment as much as I would like to.  This seems backwards to me. If someone incorrectly upvotes a bad answer, the damage is minimal, as other users can down vote it and upvote the correct answers. On the other hand, an incorrect answer wastes the time of everyone who reads it.  So, IMHO, it should require more reputation points to add an answer than to upvote or comment on an existing answer.  I wouldn't say say that users should be prevented from answering unanswered questions until they have x reputation points, as that might prevent users who have answers from providing them, but perhaps it should be required if the question is already answered, to discourage users from reiterating previously given answers.  What do you think?