It's time to remove the bounty delay

Question

A question is eligible for bounty 2 days after creation.

Probably because

New questions don't need to be bountied, since they already show up in the New tab and the Active tab and so on (and thus get attention anyways)

according to that post.

But reality is different

In the first 5 minutes after asking you get the majority of views. That has probably changed over time*. The view counts drop due to the heavy amount of new questions - thousands every day!

If you don't get an answer in the first minutes then you have to wait 2 days to put a bounty on it.

Please either remove the bounty delay or reduce it dramatically to an hour or so.

_{* Of course that query does not factor in that question lying around for years have more views than new ones. But the tendency is given IMO.}

Answer 1

I see some rather interesting arguments here, specifically when applied to the high volume sites and most specifically Stack Overflow. Things move very fast here and when something falls off the front page, it could be lost forever. But at the same time, the smaller sites do not have this problem, so it seems that lifting the 2 day waiting period for those sites is unnecessary.

I think the best solution would be to consider a per-site configurable delay. You can leave it at 2-days for most sites, and then adjust it based on question volume for the high volume sites, but I would not go any lower than 6 hours. Anything less than 6 hours is just overkill, you'll end up with too many "instant bounties", most of which will be from help vampires and students with homework due in 3 hours. Plus, for reasons I'll go into next, the community needs time to appropriately handle the question.

Quicker bounties opens up another problem related to off-topic (and/or just plain bad) question with bounties (and the "URGENT HALP NEEDED" questions). It is tough to get a bad question closed in less than an hour at times, so you could end up with situations where a question picks up a few close votes very early then the bounty gets put on before the community can actually close it. Plus, I've seen references to users using a bounty to make their question close-proof* in some cases, and I think the usage of this method would increase. Someone sees their question has picked up a few close votes, so they'll throw a bounty on it to help keep their question open.

In order to make this workable, you would need to do at least 2 things:

• Prohibit early bounties on any question with at least one vote-to-close or flag-to-close. These questions can still be bountied after the normal 2 day wait
• Allow bountied questions to get closed without needing a moderator. Maybe allow higher rep users (10K) to remove & refund a bounty if a question has close votes.

^{*- We know it isn't really close proof, but it is harder to get a bounty question closed since you need to get a mod involved.}

Answer 2

I like this idea. But I do not think it should be completely removed. Perhaps scale it.

12 hours requires at least a 250 point bounty
24 hours requires at least a 150 point bounty
36 hours requires at least a 100 point bounty
48 hours requires at least a 50 point bounty (current design)

This way it will still be uncommon to immediately post a bounty on a question. I think Servy makes a good point when he says "Also note that if you remove this limit there will be a ton more bountied questions, which means bountied questions won't get nearly as much attention". Scaling could be one way to combat that.

Answer 3

I've occasionally found myself in a situation similar to what perhaps the OP must have felt when he created this question. And yes, I can empathise with the tingling and burning for good answers, and the desire to put a big bounty out as soon as possible to get that high-quality answer you're after.

But then I remember that nothing of importance can truly be that urgent. If your question is actually good, let it sit for a while, and you may be surprised by how many good "free" contributions you're already getting without the bounty. If you still want more, or want to reward an answer that has already come in by that time, you can set the bounty after two days and all is well.

But most importantly, I think the two-day delay serves to make sure that you are still interested in the question. It's a good cool-down period both for the asker and the answerer. A bounty encourages people to put extra work and effort in, but good SO questions live and die with the interaction of the community, and especially with the original poster. So when someone goes out of their way to research for a bounty question, the effect for the community is best when the OP is active on that question. And if you're really willing to commit that much to your question, then you should still be interested and there for it two days later.

Answer 4

Can I suggest that questions become eligible for a bounty once N newer questions have been posted? Where N is a number to be determined by experience.

The interval could have upper and lower bounds - say minimum 30 minutes, maximum 48 hours. So eligibility would always be within that range, and if N new questions came in at some time within that time range, that would determine when the bounty became possible.

• So, if N questions come in in less than 30 minutes, bounty is possible after 30 minutes.
• Else if N new questions come in in less than 48 hours, bounty is possible after the Nth new question.
• Else bounty is possible after 48 hours.

Advantage: by setting it in that manner, it would automatically self-regulate over time, and across sites.

Disadvantage: it will no longer be possible to give a definitive time after which it would be possible to set a bounty. It would be more like: "you should be able to set a bounty in 6-8 hours, depending"

Answer 5

At the moment, there is a site setting we can manipulate to change the time a question needs to be on the site before a bounty can be started. That's the good news. The bad news is that units are integer days. So we can easily reduce the period to 1 day or eliminate it altogether. However, changing to hours instead of days would require code changes. Since I'm not convinced the bounty system does much more than increasing attention, I'm reluctant to ask a developer to make that change.

From a theoretical point of view, it makes sense to delay bounties by more than a few hours. As you mention, most votes occur within a few minutes of asking. Depending on the tag, questions are answered in a matter of hours on most sites. On Stack Overflow, I suspect most answerers are looking at tag pages, which have far fewer questions a day than the site as a whole. As a result, most questions don't need bounties to get views and answers. If we allow immediate bounties, it will encourage people to give up reputation for no good purpose. But after a couple of days, it's reasonable to assume an unanswered or insufficiently answered question has been forgotten. At that point, a bounty seems more likely to make a difference.

Answer 6

The problem with the fire hose pace of posts on hot boards like SO is twofold; There is likely an imbalance between the number of askers and answerers, but a larger effect, as understood by the long time denizens is that of quality. If a question does not meet a quality standard, a minimum level of polish and applicability for those who would ask a similar question in the future, it is likely to be ignored, as it does not contribute to the larger body of useful and high quality questions. Now, if the quality aspect is met by a question, yet questions don't reliably get multiple answers before 2 days, then there aren't enough experts answering questions.

There are many ways to try to address this, but one thing is that we need to make sure that we are not chasing experts away, and more, since they are incentivized by answering good questions (not clear that voting up/down is a clear sign at the moment) we need to make sure that bad questions are voted down correctly with suggestions on how to improve, and perhaps if a question is voted up, it lasts longer on the front page. However, even this may not be sufficient without different question voting incentives/guidelines; it seems like questions currently mostly get voted up when there is a healthy number of answers, so, it's more like an activity rank, and it's hard to distinguish good questions from bad for less active questions.

The concern over quality is MUCH greater than over number of contributors, and applying a Bounty does not immediately effect quality: only if the asker interacts with any who leave comments and increases quality is it any more likely to contribute to over all value of the site.