Badge for bounties offered?

Question

Would it be worth to to add a badge for offering a certain amount of rep over time (say 1000) towards bounties? It could be called the Sheriff badge.

This sounds like a good idea to me now but I've been drinking.

Update:

With the introduction of the new bounty system, this request has become relevant again! Any other thoughts?

Answer 1

I think more importantly would be an badge for winning that much rep through bounties. Say bronze if you won your first bounty, silver for at least 1000 rep through bounties and gold for 5000 or so. And yes, I also think a badge for giving bounties could be a good thing. I don't think someone easily throw away his hard-earned reputation for a bounty only to win a badge. So such an badge wouldn't hurt the system.

Answer 2

Offering a bounty means you are willing to give up some reputation for the good of the community, as all reasons eventually lead to better content or rewarding existing good content.

The act of offering is what matters most in my opinion, not manually awarding and we already got investor badge which is a good start - but I would like to see silver and gold badges as well.

• Philanthropist - Silver badge. Offered at least 5 bounties worth total of at least 1000 reputation.

• Good Samaritan - Gold badge. Offered at least 50 bounties worth total of at least 5000 reputation.

The limitations will protect the badges from gaming by offering minimum amount of reputation.

Edit: just noticed there is already pending feature request:
Can we have a badge called "big spender" or "seeder"?

Answer 3

Badges should be encouraging good behavior. It is still up for debate whether or not offering bounties counts as "good behavior" especially when you can just start making bounties for simple questions and throwing minimum rep at it.

I think a badge for winning bounties is a lot more logical than for offering up bounties.

Answer 4

Awarding a badge for offering bounties is a great way to promote this feature and help make users aware of it, as well as to encourage them to use this feature to help promote great questions.

However, I'm not 100% convinced that the name of the badge fits the actions, considering we already have existing badges named after peace officers and law enforcement that are awarded for flagging unwanted content.

As far as badge names go, I really like Plutocrat as a name for the badge. A plutocrat is:

someone who rules by virtue of his or her wealth.

Does a huge bounty not determine what questions get the most attention in the StackExchange network? Is this not a form of ruling by virtue of one's reputational wealth?

I also like Tycoon:

person who has a lot of money, power.

Below are reasons why "Sheriff" may not be the best name for a bounty badge:

While I can definitely see the correlation between "Sheriff" badge and offering a "bounty", I feel like that could be confused with the two badges that are awarded to those who raise helpful flags.

Currently, the Citizen Patrol badge is awarded to a user who, for the first time, flags a post. The Deputy badge is awarded for raising 80 helpful flags, and the Marshal badge is awarded for raising 500 helpful flags. When we look at these three badges, it's clear that we're comparing apples to apples but in varying quantities.

The proposed Sheriff badge would likely be confused with other badges intended to recognize volunteers who help keep the site clean, free of spam, and who alert diamond moderators of potential problems. Awarding bounties, on the other hand, is more closely related to awarding the accepted answer than it is to blowing the whistle on a spammer.

Since we already have some badges for those who offer and award bounties, we should look to those existing badges when deriving inspiration for naming a new badge.

Bounty Badges:

The current badges awarded for bounties are the Altruist, Benefactor, Investor, and Promoter, with the first two badges being awarded for awarding bounties and the latter two badges being awarded for offering bounties.

Therefore, with this logic, it stands to reason that a question about a badge awarded to individuals who offer bounties over time should have a name that fits within the same categories as other existing badges related to offering bounties on questions.

Investor and Promoter are those two existing badges related to bounty offerings. Here are the synonyms for those:

Investor:

From Thesaurus.com on investor:

a financier

Synonyms: backer, banker, capitalist, lender, shareholder, stockholder, venture capitalist

From Thesaurus.com on promoter:

Promoter:

a supporter

Synonyms: advertiser, advocate, ally, backer, booster, endorser, follower, organizer, publicist, sponsor

Tycoon and Plutocrat were words that are more closely related to investor, and are words I found on the same page. These are not names we've used before on badges. However, I noticed that promoter has two synonyms for two badges that we award for sharing links to questions, the Booster badge and the elusive Publicist badge. Therefore, my logic may be somewhat flawed in ruling out "Sheriff" as the name for the badge.

Still, if we are going to promote the creation of this bounty badge, I'd be interested to see a unique name chosen that helps separate it from other types of badges that are awarded for unrelated activities and that emphasize wealth or sharing of wealth.

Answer 5

Using the Top Investors query written by Jeremy Banks on the data explorer I've listed the amount of people on Stack Overflow who would are currently eligible for the proposed badges:

• 13 users have invested at least 5000 (0 users on sister sites Server Fault & Super User)
• 73 users have invested at least 2500
• 414 users have invested at least 1000
• 1404 users have invested at least 500

Gold badges on Stack Overflow range hugely from 25,691 users with the 'Famous Question' badge to the 79 users who have earned a Legendary badge.

Answer 6

1. I absolutely encourage posting while drunk. +1 to you.

2. And (soberly, sadly) I'm not sure this would be the best idea -- you could get folks offering up easy 100 points on questions they haven't selected an answer to just to get this badge. Bounties are meant to be sort of a last resort incentivizer, not something that we want everybody to aspire to.

Answer 7

I believe the goal of the bounty system is to help users to provide additional incentive to a question they would really like an answer to. Therefore, I do not believe is this a feature that needs any additional encouragement placed on it, as a badge would do. Essentially badges should be awarded to users who are providing services or behavior that the system needs. I don't think that offering bounties falls into the category of a behavior the system needs. Its an available feature, but its available for you, not the system. Voting is something the system needs to function, so there are badges related to voting. The system needs editors, flaggers and retaggers; SO would be lesser without them. I do not think SO would be lesser if no one ever offered another bounty.

Answer 8

I just won my first bounty... and was about to ask why there are no bounty related badges... I was hoping to get a boba fett badge. But reading TheTXI's answer I can see the logic in not offering a badge for offering a bounty.

So... come on Jeff, add a status-? tag so we know where you stand on this...

Answer 9

I would like to see badges for placing bounty in unanswered questions, following which the question receives positive score answer(s), and finally one such answer is offered the bounty.

• For 10 such actions, a silver badge
• For 50 such actions, a gold badge

The names can be anything like Philanthropist (which someone suggested already here), Patron, etc.

Answer 10

I agree with TheTXI here. The theory of this seems nice, but the reality of it wouldn't work. Think about it, people just randomly tossing rep in bounties on random questions for a badge. It would throw a fork into the reputation and moderation system - people gaining rep left and right.

As a much better alternative to this, how about getting a badge when you win a certain amount of rep in bounties.

This way, you still need to uphold high-quality answers to get a bounty, and bounties will remain special because there won't be too many going on at a time.

You would get rewarded with a badge when people have found you so helpful, you gained X extra rep in bounties from them.