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Sometimes on some SE sites I'll see questions that have a lot of activity and views, but very few answers, and users will typically post high award bounties in hopes of attracting answers to the questions.

Now I'm not saying that they stay unanswered forever. I'm just saying that sometimes, some questions don't get any answers within that 1 week span, and the bounty goes to waste.

In that case, could we let larger bounties last longer? For example, the standard seems to be set at a static 7 days; can we increase it by 1 day for each extra 50 rep added? So a 300 rep bounty would last 12 days? Something like this:

Rep____Time (days)
50 ---- 4
100---- 5
200---- 7
300---- 9 etc etc

At the very least, can we allow for longer bounties given higher bounties? The feature makes sense; you invest big, so the return should be big.

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    I like this because it allows users to set bounties based on how long they think it will take to get a good answer. However, if we do this, we should probably drop 50 rep bounties to 4 or 5 days.
    – user206222
    May 3, 2013 at 15:57

2 Answers 2

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I posted this in the comments however I was asked to make them an answer as well:

Sometimes you don't need the answer faster, you just need an answer to a very difficult question. I could see how this would be useful on those low traffic obscurer tabs, where users post well thought out, thorough and hard questions.

They would like an answer and increasing how long the question is on the featured tab and with a big reward, it would expose it to a bigger audience thus increasing it's chance of being seen by the right person.

However it's not about just exposure time. It's about exposure time with the high reward. Which could incentivize a user who knows more about the issue to figure out what's going on. Yes I could get it up for 3 weeks with only 350 rep but that's only at an average 115 rep per week.

If I'm looking at those featured questions and I see a hard question I know I could answer but it would take time and effort I would be more willing to answer it if I knew I had the time without the large bounty expiring.

Finally you know that not every specialized person out there who uses the site is going to have a chance to see the featured tab in a week. Life > SO (I know that's hard to admit for some of us). So if I'm one of those busy people and I haven't logged in for 8 days I think I would be much more motivated to answer those hard questions if the reward is 500 points, not the 100 or 150 it would be if the asker was just going for exposure time.

I guess the essence of what I'm getting at is that it is (exposure time * bounty amount) which makes this a useful suggestion. You can achieve one or the other right now but not both, and I think both would, for some questions, be multiplicative to the chance of getting an answer.

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    The formula could be tweaked but this is a BRILLIANT idea, and a great explanation by ryan. Has this been implemented on any SE site yet?
    – Dev Kanchen
    Oct 9, 2014 at 19:15
  • @DevKanchen No, it seems some users feel like this feature is unnecessary. As Ryan points out, it's all about exposure time.
    – yuritsuki
    Dec 12, 2014 at 5:11
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I don't really feel this is necessary. From a simple point, this mechanism already exists. You can post a new bounty if the first one doesn't bite, and in comparison to your proposed system, I can get 3 weeks of exposure for only 350 reputation with this compared to only 13 days of exposure in 500 reputation.

Also take into account how exposure is done. The featured tab is organized by "urgency", which works well when everything has the same time table. If we had longer time periods on higher payouts, then we judge by the time remaining in which lower-rep, shorter-life bounties have dominance. Alternatively, we judge by how much time has passed, in which high-rep bounties get exponential presence and can easily dwarf lower rep amounts for the entire period in which the lower rep bounty is placed.

In both cases, the long-runner bounties end up stale - they're sitting there for well over a week, apparently unable to attract a satisfactory answer. I don't think that a week is some magic number, we haven't actually done any studies that I know of with regards to optimum bounty length. But my thought pattern is that, if a whoppin' 500 points sits unclaimed for an entire week, that apparently wasn't enough motivation to get anyone to help. Sitting around for longer isn't really going to improve motivation - at that point it's about having the right person who knows the answer you need show up, and there's no inclination that's going to happen in the second week of a bounty.

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    This is also shirking aside the point where, from a general perspective, the whole reason you dump a whole 500 is to get an answer faster because it's a more attractive payout. If a 500 reputation bounty is supposed to earn an answer faster than a 50 reputation bounty, then having a longer life time doesn't really do it proper benefit.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 3, 2013 at 17:09
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    However sometimes you don't need the answer faster, you just need an answer to a very difficult question. I could see how this would be useful on those low traffic obscurer tabs, where users post well thought out, thorough and hard questions. They would like an answer and increasing how long the question is on the featured tab and with how big of a reward, it would expose it to a bigger audience thus increasing it's chance of being seen by the right person.
    – Ryan
    May 3, 2013 at 17:16
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    @ryan If all you need is exposure time, then once again, the existing mechanisms will give you a lot more exposure time.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 3, 2013 at 17:18
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    It's not about just exposer time though. I should of made that clearer, it's about exposure with the high reward. Which could incentevize a user who knows more about the issue to figure out what's going on. Yes I could get it up for 3 weeks with only 350 rep but that's only at an average 115 rep per week. If I'm looking at those featured questions and I see a hard question I know I could answer but it would take time and effort I would be more willing to answer it if I knew I had the time without the large bounty expiring.
    – Ryan
    May 3, 2013 at 17:23
  • @ryan Let me address this in the answer body here. Comments would... be cumbersome.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 3, 2013 at 18:11
  • Then why not order the exposure list based on bounty, not on time left? That gets the big point questions higher on the list, which is usually the general aim of the bounty-er
    – yuritsuki
    May 7, 2013 at 18:53
  • @Retrosaur If that was done at the same time as your suggestion, then low bounties pretty much get absolutely no visibility amidst the sea of larger bounty values, since they expire sooner and get lower priority. Which basically makes lower-tier bounties not worth the payment, since you're not going to get the visibility which is the point of casting a bounty. The advantage of a big bounty is to have the appeal on the weight of its number, not priority in being shown to people, which balances out the system.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 7, 2013 at 18:56
  • Bigger rewards attract more people. If a user only invests 50 rep into a bounty, they should get less than a user who invests 100+. Think about this. Consider having 300 rep to use on a single question. You can do 6 weeks at 50bounty each, or 1 week for 300 reputation. If it's only 1 week for 300, it should have higher priority. At least, that's how I see it.
    – yuritsuki
    May 7, 2013 at 18:57
  • @Retrosaur Right, bigger rewards do attract more people, by weight of their number. So there isn't a big need to force them above the lower counts because they already have the advantage - you get a sea of varying numbers and can pick out the high ones at a glance. In your proposed system, people have to take extra effort to navigate to lower payouts.
    – Grace Note StaffMod
    May 7, 2013 at 19:00
  • @ryan If you could post your comment as an answer, I'd love to award the bounty for you. I don't like the current solution SE has in place; it's clunky and feels awkward.
    – yuritsuki
    Jun 5, 2013 at 1:19
  • @Retrosaur I took my comments and made them an answer I also expanded on them. Sorry I was asleep when you posted your comment.
    – Ryan
    Jun 5, 2013 at 14:07

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