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The traditional reward for asking a good question is getting a good answer.

Rep and such are icing on the proverbial cake, but pale in comparison to that primary reward of a solution to a practical question based on a real problem.

But of course, there are now sites where questions aren't really questions, and answers don't necessarily solve anything. And in addition to these meta sites, there are also Puzzling and Code Golf.

Well... I applaud the cleverness of the folks who realized they could use this software in strange and delightful ways that the creators never envisioned much less designed for. I wish 'em all the best. But this is still a worthless feature for the vast, vast majority of people using these sites, a large increase in complexity for precious little real value.

##Appendix: Rollup of issues raised in comments:

• Only benefits sites that aren't primarily used for Q&A (there's Ziv's suggestion that this might be used to encourage askers in niche tags, but I'm skeptical - when rep is scarce in a particular area, giving it away to others is a zero-sum game unless you can draw in outsiders, which answer bounties do but this probably wouldn't).
• Couldn't be used on child-meta sites at all (no separate rep system).
• Ripe for fraud - would need additional rules in place to reduce / prevent this.
• Featuring becomes meaningless without the desire to encourage answers, so would need some sort of auxiliary system for oversight.
• Without separate offer and reward events, would need some other means of rate limiting (the 3 active bounty restriction becomes meaningless when a bounty is never "active" for longer than it takes to reward it).

##See also: Should we have a small number of Supervotes per day?

The traditional reward for asking a good question is getting a good answer.

Rep and such are icing on the proverbial cake, but pale in comparison to that primary reward of a solution to a practical question based on a real problem.

But of course, there are now sites where questions aren't really questions, and answers don't necessarily solve anything. And in addition to these meta sites, there are also Puzzling and Code Golf.

Well... I applaud the cleverness of the folks who realized they could use this software in strange and delightful ways that the creators never envisioned much less designed for. I wish 'em all the best. But this is still a worthless feature for the vast, vast majority of people using these sites, a large increase in complexity for precious little real value.

Appendix: Rollup of issues raised in comments:

• Only benefits sites that aren't primarily used for Q&A (there's Ziv's suggestion that this might be used to encourage askers in niche tags, but I'm skeptical - when rep is scarce in a particular area, giving it away to others is a zero-sum game unless you can draw in outsiders, which answer bounties do but this probably wouldn't).
• Couldn't be used on child-meta sites at all (no separate rep system).
• Ripe for fraud - would need additional rules in place to reduce / prevent this.
• Featuring becomes meaningless without the desire to encourage answers, so would need some sort of auxiliary system for oversight.
• Without separate offer and reward events, would need some other means of rate limiting (the 3 active bounty restriction becomes meaningless when a bounty is never "active" for longer than it takes to reward it).

See also: Should we have a small number of Supervotes per day?

The traditional reward for asking a good question is getting a good answer.

Rep and such are icing on the proverbial cake, but pale in comparison to that primary reward of a solution to a practical question based on a real problem.

But of course, there are now sites where questions aren't really questions, and answers don't necessarily solve anything. And in addition to these meta sites, there are also Puzzling and Code Golf.

Well... I applaud the cleverness of the folks who realized they could use this software in strange and delightful ways that the creators never envisioned much less designed for. I wish 'em all the best. But this is still a worthless feature for the vast, vast majority of people using these sites, a large increase in complexity for precious little real value.

##Appendix: Rollup of issues raised in comments:

• Only benefits sites that aren't primarily used for Q&A (there's Ziv's suggestion that this might be used to encourage askers in niche tags, but I'm skeptical - when rep is scarce in a particular area, giving it away to others is a zero-sum game unless you can draw in outsiders, which answer bounties do but this probably wouldn't).
• Couldn't be used on child-meta sites at all (no separate rep system).
• Ripe for fraud - would need additional rules in place to reduce / prevent this.
• Featuring becomes meaningless without the desire to encourage answers, so would need some sort of auxiliary system for oversight.
• Without separate offer and reward events, would need some other means of rate limiting (the 3 active bounty restriction becomes meaningless when a bounty is never "active" for longer than it takes to reward it).

##See also: Should we have a small number of Supervotes per day?

The traditional reward for asking a good question is getting a good answer.

Rep and such are icing on the proverbial cake, but pale in comparison to that primary reward of a solution to a practical question based on a real problem.

But of course, there are now sites where questions aren't really questions, and answers don't necessarily solve anything. And in addition to these meta sites, there are also Puzzling and Code Golf.

Well... I applaud the cleverness of the folks who realized they could use this software in strange and delightful ways that the creators never envisioned much less designed for. I wish 'em all the best. But this is still a worthless feature for the vast, vast majority of people using these sites, a large increase in complexity for precious little real value.

##Appendix: Rollup of issues raised in comments:

• Only benefits sites that aren't primarily used for Q&A (there's Ziv's suggestion that this might be used to encourage askers in niche tags, but I'm skeptical - when rep is scarce in a particular area, giving it away to others is a zero-sum game unless you can draw in outsiders, which answer bounties do but this probably wouldn't).
• Couldn't be used on child-meta sites at all (no separate rep system).
• Ripe for fraud - would need additional rules in place to reduce / prevent this.
• Featuring becomes meaningless without the desire to encourage answers, so would need some sort of auxiliary system for oversight.
• Without separate offer and reward events, would need some other means of rate limiting (the 3 active bounty restriction becomes meaningless when a bounty is never "active" for longer than it takes to reward it).

##See also: Should we have a small number of Supervotes per day?

The traditional reward for asking a good question is getting a good answer.

Rep and such are icing on the proverbial cake, but pale in comparison to that primary reward of a solution to a practical question based on a real problem.

But of course, there are now sites where questions aren't really questions, and answers don't necessarily solve anything. And in addition to these meta sites, there are also Puzzling and Code Golf.

Well... I applaud the cleverness of the folks who realized they could use this software in strange and delightful ways that the creators never envisioned much less designed for. I wish 'em all the best. But this is still a worthless feature for the vast, vast majority of people using these sites, a large increase in complexity for precious little real value.

##Appendix: Rollup of issues raised in comments:

• Only benefits sites that aren't primarily used for Q&A (there's Ziv's suggestion that this might be used to encourage askers in niche tags, but I'm skeptical - when rep is scarce in a particular area, giving it away to others is a zero-sum game unless you can draw in outsiders, which answer bounties do but this probably wouldn't).
• Couldn't be used on child-meta sites at all (no separate rep system).
• Ripe for fraud - would need additional rules in place to reduce / prevent this.
• Featuring becomes meaningless without the desire to encourage answers, so would need some sort of auxiliary system for oversight.
• Without separate offer and reward events, would need some other means of rate limiting (the 3 active bounty restriction becomes meaningless when a bounty is never "active" for longer than it takes to reward it).

##See also: Should we have a small number of Supervotes per day?

The traditional reward for asking a good question is getting a good answer.

Rep and such are icing on the proverbial cake, but pale in comparison to that primary reward of a solution to a practical question based on a real problem.

But of course, there are now sites where questions aren't really questions, and answers don't necessarily solve anything. And in addition to these meta sites, there are also Puzzling and Code Golf.

Well... I applaud the cleverness of the folks who realized they could use this software in strange and delightful ways that the creators never envisioned much less designed for. I wish 'em all the best. But this is still a worthless feature for the vast, vast majority of people using these sites, a large increase in complexity for precious little real value.

##Appendix: Rollup of issues raised in comments:

• Only benefits sites that aren't primarily used for Q&A (there's Ziv's suggestion that this might be used to encourage askers in niche tags, but I'm skeptical - when rep is scarce in a particular area, giving it away to others is a zero-sum game unless you can draw in outsiders, which answer bounties do but this probably wouldn't).
• Couldn't be used on child-meta sites at all (no separate rep system).
• Ripe for fraud - would need additional rules in place to reduce / prevent this.
• Featuring becomes meaningless without the desire to encourage answers, so would need some sort of auxiliary system for oversight.
• Without separate offer and reward events, would need some other means of rate limiting (the 3 active bounty restriction becomes meaningless when a bounty is never "active" for longer than it takes to reward it).

##See also: Should we have a small number of Supervotes per day?