Shedding rep on bounties

Question

I have decided that my experience on SO would be better had I no reputation (but could keep the privileges I acquired). I would like to give away four large bounties of 500 rep, which I would do periodically to shed reputation.

Do you think this is a good idea? Any questions to suggest? I would be looking for simple problems with difficult answers.

EDIT: I feel this way because by competitive nature, rep sometimes influences the way I answer questions (hurrying to be the first answer then editing, answering questions I am not really interested in, going for easy answers, having beginner users assume some level of competencey due to rep, etc.). If I take away the fact that I have reputation, my involvement will be purely for the sake of collaboration, and not for any other motive, however implicit they may be. Kind of like the zen of SO.

Losing privileges does not really matter, I will regain them in time, if desired.

EDIT2: I've heard two good suggestions: using community wiki for my answers, and masking the rep scores with greasemonkey.

Answer 1

It seems to me that the issue you are having is with the concept of reputation and it's competative nature on this site, rather than the quantity you do or don't have. From that point of view, it would seem to me that the best thing for you would be for no one to have reputation.

Once you reach the conclusion that reputation in general is making the site less pleasing for you than it could otherwise be, the next logical step is to try and simply remove it from the pages. A greasemoneky (or similar) client side script or browser extension that simply removes reputation indicators (or at least most of them) should be fairly easy to write.

In fact, even just a client-size CSS script would work, since it seems that the rep score is pretty easy to grab with a CSS selector. Something like this: (note: not tested at all)

.reputation-score {display: none}

The beauty of this is that if you ever have a change of heart later, you can always show the scores again, and you don't lose any privileges at all. It also doesn't affect any of the other users of the system, and still allows all of the system's features and mechanics to work normally.

Answer 2

Starting bounties just to "shed rep" is of course not what the bounty system is for.

Abusing the bounty system (or any feature) harms and goes against the spirit of the site.

If you can find questions that honestly deserve or need a bounty to answer them, then by all means - go for it, but dredging up activity on random questions just because you're bored or sick of looking at your reputation score is not going to help anyone.

Answer 3

It's not a good idea to "dump" reputation on bounties for a number of reasons. For example:

1. I'm almost certain that you can't keep privileges without the necessary reputation. In other words, if you give away all of your reputation through bounties, you will lose all of the privileges associated with that reputation as well.
2. Starting multiple high-rep bounties simultaneously could dilute the focus of the bounties. If you really want to give questions more exposure, don't you think that it would be more effective to do so one question at a time?
3. I'm not aware of any conclusive evidence that a 500-rep bounty is any more effective at garnering answers than, say, a 100-rep bounty. In terms of giving questions more exposure, I think that it would be better to place twenty 100-rep bounties (over the course of a few months) than four 500-rep bounties in two weeks.

Regardless of your reasons for doing so, remember that the decision to award a bounty is yours and yours alone. Place bounties on the questions that you personally feel deserve more attention, rather than asking the community to put it to a vote.

Answer 4

You'll always be competitive; it's human nature.

Just remember that reputation shouldn't be your way of measuring your knowledge. Only you know your capabilities. Don't let an online community dictate that for you.

We all instinctively go for easy answers, and we always think we're going to be praised by users with less reputation, but that's all in our nature. Though, I think Stack Exchange does a good job of keeping their users in shape, even despite these selfish thoughts.

And even if you're answering questions out of your own desire to be praised, you're still answering questions, aren't you? Reputation may be a very selfish concept, but it also motivates us to do what we do on this site—help fellow programmers.