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I posted a late answer to a featured Meta.SE question last week, and was really interested in getting feedback on it.

Because it was posted late, and the question was featured on SO before I posted, there are quite a few responses already and I suspect mine just gets lost in the pack.

Is it OK to throw a bounty on a question to draw attention to your own answer?

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Yes, nothing wrong in doing that but being only one out of many other answers, don't build your hopes too high to not get disappointed too much.

Bounty is drawing attention to the question, only few will read the message so even if you link to your answer, not many will notice. The actual result would more likely be more upvotes to the top answers, possibly new answers.

Your call, and of course I might be wrong. :)

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Yes, it is ok. You can start a bounty to draw attention if you already answered, however minimal amount is 100, not 50. I did it already two times. If you start a 100 rep bounty on a question you already answered, keep in mind that to compensate bounty, your answer needs to be up voted 10 times. Or maybe...

enter image description here

...4320 times.

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  • Thanks. I'm not really concerned about rep, but was concerned people would see it as someone just trying to get extra rep, as opposed to someone seeking feedback on their answer. Guess there's not too much I can do about that :)
    – Rachel
    Jun 24, 2014 at 19:10
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No, it's rude. Bounties are intended to draw potential answerers. These answerers have to spend time reading and understanding the question. If there isn't still an open problem to be solved, then you're wasting their time since they likely won't be able to add new information. That's time they could have spent reading a question with a bounty that does still have an open problem that needs solving, time that could have resulted in being able to post an answer.

The Help page even explicitly discourages it:

To avoid overly promotional bounties, if you are offering a bounty on a question that you have already posted an answer to, your minimum spend is 100 reputation (not 50).

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  • Three of seven bounty reasons (current answers are outdated, improve details, reward existing answer) are designed for a purpose other than drawing new answers. Two of seven are explicitly there to draw new answers. The others are somewhere in the middle.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Jun 26, 2018 at 16:41
  • @NathanTuggy Answers being outdated or incomplete is clearly for the purpose of drawing new answers. Even if you assume that an existing answer would get updated, it's still asking for new info. There is still an open problem to be solved. The only one that isn't designed to draw answers of some kind is the one to reward an existing one.
    – jpmc26
    Jun 26, 2018 at 16:43
  • The bounty text disagrees with you. "The current answer(s) are out-of-date and require revision given recent changes." is pretty unambiguously about editing, not primarily posting new answers. And "The current answers do not contain enough detail.", while a bit more ambivalent, does obviously intend to include rewarding answer edits as well. The existence of a bounty always incentivizes posting a new answer, but looking at the bounty reasons shows clearly that three of them intend to reward editing answers much more than the norm.
    – Nathan Tuggy
    Jun 26, 2018 at 16:52
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    @NathanTuggy Sure, but that makes no sense in practice. The original poster is unlikely to notice, and someone hoping for a bounty isn't going to edit an existing answer so that it gets the bounty. The most likely outcome is a new answer. And as I said, even if you assume editing, it's still asking for new information about an open problem.
    – jpmc26
    Jun 26, 2018 at 17:13

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