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I asked a question which got very little attention due to its specific topic, so I offered a 100 rep bounty for it. After the bounty being set, this one guy was spending a lot of time helping me, and the problem turned out to be way harder than I had originally thought. I'd love to give him another +50 or even +100 rep, but apparently I have to double the bounty amount from last time. If I offer too little (100 instead of 150), why am I'm forced to give too much (300)? This ended up with me not giving another bounty when he deserved one.

I suggest adding a way to directly reward a bounty to a person without having to double the reward's size. To prevent abusing of the bounty system by giving additional attention to the question, this bounty should go "silently" to the other person without any bounty notifications.

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  • Directly awarding reputation through a bounty would encourage and allow bad players to game the system.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 17:25
  • 2
    Might be, but how? Doesn't the system already have this, but it just forces doubling the amount (which is exactly what this question is against)?
    – Mahi
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 17:28
  • Having a requirement to double the reputation makes transferring to a user reputation difficult, which is the entire point, of said requirement. A bounty isn't, about the author of the answer, it's about the answer itself.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 17:33
  • Does this answer your question? Is mass bountying considered vote fraud? meta.stackexchange.com/a/105639/282094 meta.stackexchange.com/a/278258/282094
    – Rob
    Commented Mar 22, 2022 at 10:23

1 Answer 1

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Because of the amount of attention a bounty provides, it was found that users could keep adding +50 bounties repeatedly and would gain more than enough upvotes to make up the amount spent.1 This is an effort to minimize this gamesmanship without removing the ability to add subsequent bounties.

See: “Abusing” bounties for unlimited profit

1 Of course, this will only be true on a high-volume site like Stack Overflow.

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  • I see, that sure does make sense. I feel like it hurts the actual purpose though, would it be possible to add a way to directly grant bounty on an already existing answer? This would end up not giving any more attention to the question, and it would be just a bit more than "thank you".
    – Mahi
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 16:50
  • One of the reasons for a bounty is to "reward already existing answer", but it still marks the question has having a bounty and could prompt others to answer, and is still subject to the doubling requirement. Don't get the idea to go to someone's profile and find a number of their answers to upvote either, since that's serial upvoting and will be rolled back by the system.
    – ale
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 16:53
  • Virtually everything you could possibly want to know can be found at How does the bounty system work?
    – ale
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 16:54
  • This question is tagged as a feature-request, "would it be possible to add a way to directly grant bounty on an already existing answer?" was more of a suggestion than it was a question on how the system works.
    – Mahi
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 16:56
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    If your question is supposed to be a feature request, it doesn't read that way. You probably want to clarify.
    – ale
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 17:07
  • Alright, hopefully that clarifies a little.
    – Mahi
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 17:10

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