Increase upper limit of bounty

Question

Change the bounty upper limit to 50k, because 500 seems outdated and cheap. If a newbie gets a good answer in, more power to them.

Think of it like Jeopardy. Remember about the turn of the century when the rules changed and you could win longer than one week. It was a good change. All time Jeopardy champion
Think of it like The $25000 Pyramid. I remember seeing reruns in black and white when it was like $5k. It was a good change.

There are plenty of users with more than 50k. I looked at a bunch of profiles yesterday with a serious amount of bounty. I would spend every night for a couple months or longer on a 50k solution.

Community benefit: Large open source projects could really get some good exposure with a 50k bounty.

500 I'm asking for 3000 on one question right now. I have the answer working and won't share it till I get 3k for it. Don't think me bad. I'm still participating; it's just on one question that the community and blogs can't answer yet.

Maybe if this gets to -100 I'll take it down.

As for my bounty score, I have four stars at asp.net which I made in three months four years ago – exactly halfway to five stars. I'm no stranger to how these boards work and how search engines love linkbacks. One of these days I'll start blogging on my website and link answers back to my website just to get a few more up clicks.

Answer 1

Look at the data.

By far, 50-reputation bounties are the most common. If my query's correct, currently there have only been 1,726 500-reputation bounties (vs. 58,847 50-reputation bounties). If the limit were increased, would it be used? The data suggest that such an occasion would be rare.

Answer 2

Bounties aren't meant to transfer great amounts of rep. They are intended to simply attract attention to a question. They are also not meant to get away with very broad questions. That is, you can't just pay your way out of a poor question with the excuse that you're "offering quite the amount of rep for it".

Awarding great amounts of rep has some undesirable side-effects. Your 50k limit for example, could theoretically grant a user with all the site's privileges in one shot. Not only does that seem unfair to some who have had to work pretty hard for that, it also potentially provides users with tools for which they might not have the actual experience. And while rep is only a rough measure of how much the community trusts you, your proposal could completely destroy that notion.

Just start out with a small bounty. And if that is not enough, award bounties again until you've reached the maximum, should your question require all that much attention. If it does however, you might want to rethink the question you're asking.

The only exception to the "attracting attention" principle is the awarding of reputation to an already existing, excellent answer. But I'd say that 500 rep for those would already be quite a significant amount, and I see no reason to increase that .

Answer 3

there are only 400 users having reputation more than 50k. Awarding 500 bounty is enough to motivate or say thanks to someone.

On 200 average for daily reputation it takes 250 days to earn 50k reputation. No one want to give away for one question.

Answer 4

If you want the bounty limit increased, why 50K? Why not 1K, 2K, 5K, 10K, etc.? Why such a higher number? 50K seems excessively high. There are some SE sites where no users have that much reputation (and even on SO there aren't all that many) and I agree with the comments that there probably aren't any answers worth that much anyway, nor is there really a need for a higher maximum bounty.

If someone feels an answer is especially good, they already have several avenues for rewarding it: upvotes, bounties, accepting, etc. Furthermore, the same user can award multiple bounties to an answer, so it's already possible for someone to award you more than 500 reputation through bounties. Furthermore, multiple people can award bounties on the same answer, so if the community feels that an answer really deserves more than 500, multiple users can award it bounties. This already gives multiple avenues for an exceptional answer to be awarded more than one bounty's worth of reputation.