In the past, Jeff always read bounty questions on meta so offering a bounty was the best way to make sure that someone from Stack Exchange replied to your question.
Now he's gone, is this still the case? If not, could someone else volunteer to start doing this? I ask because it seems a useful way to attract your attention and I've never seen a bounty on meta expire before (though I'm sure there are other examples). Thanks!
The short answer is yes, putting a bounty on it increases the chance of us having another look. The same, though, is true of insightful answers, discussions in The Tavern, and questions staying "alive" even when there's no bounty on them.
Let me however say a few things about bounties on meta. These are my personal views, I don't know how much this is true for other members of the team. Some of this may be anecdotal; this is merely how I feel about them.
I've seen several cases where an absolutely unexciting "Wouldn't it be nice if my particular edge case was handled differently" post gets one to several bounties within a very short time of being posted. To me, this feels like a combination of "I really want this. No, really really." and "It's been a month and I still can't create purple-colored posts, Y U NO DROP EVERYTHING ELSE AND DO?"
To be honest, this can make me think "Yeah, whatever" sometimes. I know that's a totally unhelpful knee-jerk reaction, but yeah, I'm just human.
In many cases, bounty posts are much more interesting for us because they tend to get community feedback. If the community discusses pros and cons of a suggested feature, maybe coming up with improvements, noticing possible shortcomings, etc., that's way more helpful for us in evaluating proposals than "Hey, if I implement this now, I can get some precious Meta rep!" (I'm not saying the latter never happens.)
Your specific example, for instance, is a) extremely broad ("review X on all the sites"), b) is always an issue because people tend to think that everybody's montiors are calibrated just as theirs are. Valid point or not, it'd be much better if that bounty of yours attracted community answers, not ours.
The number of bounties has exploded on meta over the past year or so. Case in point:
Quarter | No of bounties Quarter | No of bounties
--------+--------------- --------+---------------
2009/3 | 54 2011/1 | 113
2009/4 | 18 2011/2 | 125
2010/1 | 49 2011/3 | 132
2010/2 | 49 2011/4 | 163
2010/3 | 100 2012/1 | 229
2010/4 | 64
With Meta rep being a) ridiculously easy to get, and b) totally worthless, everybody and their dog throws a bounty onto their pet feature request. It's of course everybody's right to do so, but unfortunately this also spreads both us and the community thin as far as discussion of valid requests go. Infamous joke bounties of course don't help increasing the signal-to-noise ratio here.
So, two things I'd like you (the community) to take away from here are:
If a request – featured or not – is worthy of discussion (in either direction), don't just throw an upvote or downvote on the question. I may be an old fart as far as Meta goes, but I remember much more lively discussion whether suggestion X is a good idea or not, while these days, people just throw votes around.
Tons of votes aren't helpful. For one thing, even if lots of people would love to have a certain feature, this doesn't necessarily mean it's going to happen. On the other hand, we all know that with the right amount of meme usage and/or conspiracy theories, it's fairly easy to get upvotes on meta. Bounty questions tend to skew the validity of post scores as measures of usefulness even more.
This doesn't mean we need tons of "me too" answers (which is also something we had a lot in the good ol' days). But there has to be a healthy middle ground.
When you offer a bounty on a Meta request, don't do it to attract us. Offer a bounty to attract discussion.
Again, these are just my personal thoughts. We're all different people, so we tend to handle things differently.
