Here's one to get shot down: How about letting bounties to be set using the reputation gained through the use of another site? So, for instance, I'm a programmer with a high Stack Overflow rep who hates using computers. Wouldn't it be useful for me to be able to exchange some of my excess Stack Overflow credit to incentivise a question on Super User?
Or perhaps I'd like to highlight a question on Meta Stack Overflow, but I don't spend my time there.
This makes a lot of sense to me. Most of us are specialized to a large degree, making it hard to build up adequate amounts of rep at all of the sites. The site where you aren't an expert is the site where you'd most likely find a bounty to be useful.
If you're a moderator that should send shivers down your spine. Thought finding sock puppets and voting rings was bad enough? Now you have 100 sites on which your voting ring could be centered. In theory it can be easy to find if someone gives bounties in exchange for upvotes on one site. But what if Bob gives Alice a bounty on UX for upvotes on Stack Overflow? As a UX mod, all I see is the UX bounty. Seems legit, I'd never think anything of it.
This would require new, cross site mod tools. Which should be scary for all sorts of reasons; now you're querying 100 databases (we get rate limited enough in the mod tools thanks), potentially having to investigate crap on sites you're not a mod on, it's a mess and all for incredibly little gain.
When I see a bounty, someone with rep on that site set that bounty. Rep is a rough measure, but usually that means when someone sets a bounty on UX, they did it because it's a good UX question. I really don't want to start seeing people cast 50 rep bounties on every single "design my interface" question because they have more rep on SO than they could give away in a billion years. The barrier to entry is useful. Bounties are supposed to hurt, if I can give away rep from a site I don't care about or a site I have far too much rep on I can just spam rep on anything for any reason, give it to friends, whatever. I'm not going to use my extra 8k MSO rep anyway
The obvious solution is to lock this feature down tight. A rule here, two rules there, some rate limits in the back, some mod tools in the truck. But at what cost? Seriously, if you have to add a dozen rules to a feature before it gets released your feature needs major justification, much more than "wouldn't it be cool". Given the suggestions for rules so far this tool sounds like it would:
So no, I think this is a really bad idea which needs to be propped up by lots of really bad rules for amazingly little gain. Let's just keep rep separate, keep bounties meaningful and relevant, and not give moderators massive cross site bounty rings to deal with all for the sake of bountying "how can I make pasta as a programmer".
On the first glance, this looks like a good idea: If I earned reputation hard by answering questions in my specialty field, why shouldn't I be allowed to spend some of this for my questions in the fields where I'm not so good, and really need the help?
For example, I've answered lots of questions on Stack Overflow, but now I have a cooking question (and I have about no chance to earn significant reputation on Seasoned Advice, this is why I need the question answered), so why shouldn't I be allowed to use some of my SO reputation to put a bounty on my cooking question?
This would make the cross-site reputation a kind of global SE currency (but usable only for bounty purposes).
The problem with this is that reputation on different sites has actually different value. On some sites it is a lot easier to earn upvotes with an answer (or a question) than on other ones. (The same problem is existent within Stack Overflow, though: Answers in more frequented tags get a lot more votes than answers of similar difficulty in small tags. But it is somehow deemed okay.)
Additionally, the idea is that each site can develop its own community, and the site-reputation should somehow measure the standing in this community. Receiving a bounty from someone outside the community does not relate to this.
I think this could lead to some potential abuse (basically using rep on one site to boost up an account on another site).
It's an interesting idea and the way you described it as a way for people who are invested in one site to get a potentially quick answer on another site without having to go through the effort of building up rep there sounds logical. I just don't have a very good feeling that it would ever even get seriously considered.
I totally agree, though I'm not surprised to notice that it has already been proposed and was just ignored.
I'll copy+paste my duplicate post here:
Wouldn't it be nice to have cross-site bounties?
After all, if I am a developer I am likely to have points on SO, and not many on SF, and vice-versa.
I think probably everyone would benefit from such a feature.
Update: I agree that cross-site reputation, privileges or many other things would be bad. Bounties however, are a completely different topic. You "pay" some earned rep to the person that will answer a question that isn't get an answer otherwise. You are skilled in a field, and you need help in another field: that's the founding principle of the entire economic system in general.
Cross-site privileges would mean awarding powers in a field to people who do not have earned it in that filed, and that is bad.
Cross-site bounties means allowing you to sell your milk to buy some meat.
Edit: one possible addition to that, just in case too many people frown upon such a feature, could be not to add the extra 50 rep for the cross-site bounties.
I think that'd work good for the technical, even somewhat related computer sites, like SO, Ubuntu, Apple, etc., but not so sure about the non-technical computer sites like English, Cooking, etc.
Since you're buying the bounty with rep that is supposed to represent some level of knowledge, I think the cross-site bounties would work well for interrelated sites. If you have the rep on Stack Overflow, then that should show you have some level of technical acumen, so that you can be trusted on the other technical sites like Super User to bounty relevant questions.
I think this is one example of why fragmentation of the QA sites is not a very good thing (see also What could be done to serve domain specific "communities" better on SO?) and perhaps some tighter integration (perhaps even a reputation shared between all sites) could be better.
I predict this answer can provoke comments about how I cannot compare reputation from Stack Overflow with reputation from Super User, as the fact I understand one does not mean I understand the other. This, however, is in my opinion no different from the fact that while I have quite solid C++ background, I do not understand a bit about AJAX, Ruby, SQL and other things questioned on SO, yet this is not apparent from the reputation I have on SO, and still this does not seem to cause any issues.
Even though I support this request, I think there is a problem to this suggestion, which is abuse.
The moment a user register on a site, he gets 101 reputation, those can be used as bounty on any other site, without affecting his reputation on any of the sites he cares about.
I think he later can delete and re-create an account on the same site, and getting 101 reputation again.
The solution Could be to only allow transferring of reputation for bounties, only from sites that has reputation over a specific limit (lets say 400?).
And to put a condition that setting bounties on a remote site should not make the current site reputation fall below a specific limit (lets say 300).
This would also limit the usage of this feature to only users who are somewhat experienced.
The problem with this is that it's about more than reputation is about more than just privileges, and it's more than just "points" - the reason that it has any value at all is that it is about your reputation.
If I can gain reputation as a cook for my prowess as a programmer, then reputation no longer has any real value at all, and the entire system devolves completely into a game. The reason it's not entirely a game at the moment is that in order to "win" the game, you actually have to be really good at whatever field it is that you're in.
Removing that restriction would entirely ruin SE.
If you think that one SE site is related enough to another site to deserve cross-site reputation bonuses (such as cross-site bounties) a better approach would be to allow some portion of all reputation gained on one site affect your apparent reputation on another.
I personally feel that that is not justified, however - if the two sites are so related that reputation for one can count as reputation for the other, they should probably not be separate sites at all.
I think that in general it is good idea.
Question is about details (whether implement 1:1 credit transfer, or divide with factor different for each site e.g. "bounty 100 on TCS.SE is worth 500 of bounty from another sites", limits... etc).
Idea behind this is about exchange of help, between people keen on different domains.
Let's take specific example:
One should be very careful to reject a feature with big potential benefits just because it opens the door to some abuse. One should worry more on the users that do legit use of the site more than the abusers. Also, SE exchange already have systems in place to avoid that, and that it is granting power in proportion of a measure of how trusted a user is (reputation).
I think this feature would be extremely useful! But it should be a privilege earned at a significant level of reputation and requires an exchange rate. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, the bases for such exchange rate could be the same used to weight the "arbitrary hotness points" of questions across different SE sites.
I'm a geoscientist, and I got good reputation on Earth Sciences SE. But now and then, I have an urgent need to solve a programming, biology or English Language question. The benefits to me as a SE user, would be greatly increased if I can use my Earth Sciences reputation to set bounties to questions on topics outside my field of expertise.
I think that's the whole point of SE: sharing knowledge. But this is undermined as the SE network gets fragmented in various specialist sites. Because at the end I will be able to earn reputation only in the very topic I'm specialist on, so that if I can't solve my own question, it is unlikely anyone else will.
I've been contributing to math.SE for a few years now, answering where I could. Today I teach mostly in one field of maths, I teach basic stuff but I really would like to know more, so I'm more likely to have questions than answers.
Problem: this field of maths has its own separate SE.
So I've got 25k rep on math.SE, that I can't use to bring attention to the few questions I have, just because people have decided that these questions belong to another site. Makes no sense to me.
So I totally agree with this idea. If people are afraid that there might be abuse, as shown in this question (which is a duplicate but was received totally differently for some reason), then cross-site bounties could be limited to sites with related topics.
In practical terms this would be very interesting if applied across trifecta sites (META has nothing to do with this), and limited in amount and purpose. Namely bounties.
Observe:
I need my website to do thing X. That's a programming question. Yay, I'm good on StackOverflow. Oh no, wait, it's totally dependant on server configuration. I guess there's ServerFault. I can ask there...
Several days later and my question has only had 4 views. I want my question to get more views, so I could offer a bounty. I'm not too good at server configuration and all the questions I could possibly answer on ServerFault to build any sort of semblance of a reputation are really hard and above my pay grade. The questions I could answer at my level have been answered for the last 6-7 years.
Many Trifecta users are full-stack developers with some DevOps on the side, and that makes us travel from one end of the spectrum to the other, but maybe we're only familiar with one end.
tl;dr: Would I give up some of my StackOverflow rep to help a ServerFault question get some attention? Yes. Would I do it for a 2:1 deal? Yes. 5:1? Still yes. I need them answers.
