I have an idea for dealing with a question you badly want to be answered, which no one will answer, even after you've offered a large bounty: cash.
Users can offer cash, and whoever has the accepted answer can be paid, possibly via PayPal.
Does this sound like a good idea?
If I know the answer but am not willing to put the time in to answer your question for free... then I'm probably not gonna do it for $20 either.
But someone will.
Guaranteed, someone, somewhere has time to burn and needs cash. No guarantee they know the answer, mind you... but they'll take a guess at it. And since they really need that $20, they'll likely hang around and down-vote any other answers, while picking fights with anyone who criticizes theirs. Just look at the little fights people get into over rep now, and spice it up with some desperation...
So if you just want answers, and lots of 'em, but don't really care if they actually answer the question... And if you love flame wars... Then yes, this is a great idea.
If you like anything about the way the site works now, then it's a terrible idea.
Joel and Jeff talked about this on one of the podcasts... they believe offering financial incentives reinforces the wrong behavior.
People should be motivated to answer questions because they are interested in the field, not because they are offered some money.
bounty for rare blood groups. I know college students who sell blood once in a while and buys alcohol with the bounty :)
Commented
Oct 13, 2009 at 9:59
Yeah, and after you answer, if the person refuses to pay up, Jeff and Joel should have to mediate the dispute. Or, maybe we can just migrate the question to LawyerOverflow?
Sorry, but no...
The Economics of Selling Information:
This may sound like an overgeneralization, but it seems that when you pay to have humans answer your questions, you often talk to so-called experts, and when you get answers for free, you either talk to a librarian, a random stranger, or an open source aficionado. The difference between the Google Answers' model and the public/academic library model appears mainly that when a librarian gives a patron a response to their reference query, the patron tends not to argue with her. If she tells the patron the question has no definitive answer, that response is more likely taken as fact rather than a personal failing on the librarian's part. The fact that all library patrons share the time of the librarians tends to encourage a polite acceptance that each patron's specific question is one of many needing to be answered.
In the Google Answers arena, I have seen researchers insulted, sworn at, and otherwise degraded by people not happy with the responses they received, when you might think that just not paying for the answer would be reprobation enough. Part of the Google Answers standards of conduct include politeness and friendliness at all times and not discussing Google policies or pricing with question askers. Catering and kowtowing to upset customers at the expense of explaining to them that their question was priced too low or phrased too poorly became a trade-off I had difficulty making.
While I enjoyed my time at Google Answers, I was soured by people asking $4 questions and not being satisfied with the depth of the responses they received, responses that had clearly taken a fair amount of the researcher's time. One of the strict rules at Google Answers forbids discussing the amount of money offered for a question. If the questioner offers too little, the researcher should simply refuse to answer their question. Of course, in the competition for scarce questions, this never happened, except in extreme instances. It seemed indelicate or rude to point out to a questioner that if they had placed a higher price on a response, they might have gotten better research and more time from the researcher. Is the customer always right if they want skilled research for $4 an hour? This "customer is always right" philosophy that pervades marketplace interactions seemed to override personal senses of reasonableness in many cases. Google Answers is currently working on guidelines for what kinds of questions most appropriately fit into the various price ranges. Researchers will welcome this tool.
The fact that there are people willing to answer a potentially difficult question for $1.87 does not mean that it is a good idea to encourage people to expect more research for less money, especially when supposedly interacting with experts. The Google Answers system prides itself on having talented workers and yet at the same time encourages — though does not force — them to frequently work for a fraction of the price that degreed, experienced experts could earn for the same work. While determining the free market value of this sort of information retrieval and presentation — most of which is available online, for free — is tricky, my experience working for Google Answers made me feel more often like I was being paid to do Google searches that the questioners didn't have the time or the skill to do, rather than using my research background and abilities to turn facts into actual knowledge.
In summary: There is far greater demand for (paid) work than there is for helpful people. Therefore people fight for paid work even when they don't really understand what they are supposed to be doing. Helpful people are a plentiful and easily "exploited" resource on the internet since having a computer and the time to surf implies a prerequisite degree of financial stability and generosity. Paid work and stingy answers go hand-in-hand. I have noticed that the best answers are often posted by individuals who merely researched the question for themselves. An expert well often post a link to an answer as a comment and then a fellow inquisitor who has more of a work ethic than the asker and more interest than the the expert (who already understood) will write up the answer found at the link. 99% of Stack-exchange questions are answered in books. Taken from this perspective the majority of Stack Exchange questions are reference-requests.
The process of creating scientific journals provides significant insights into the lengths that intellectuals will go to both pursue their interests and pad their resumes with little or no financial compensation. They are the antithesis of businessmen. I think a lot of this goes back to the psychology of melancholy individuals who tend to form a majority of the intellectuals: melancholies love recognition.
Stack Exchange currently is a facilitator in the sense that it lowers the transaction costs between an interested individual and someone more knowledgeable. Instead of e-mailing numerous experts I post a question and the available and helpful ones generously share their expertise.
Prestige is its own reward.
"It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, But the glory of kings is to search out a matter. Proverbs 25:2."
Oliver Heavenside rejected financial compensation from Bell Laboratories for his work showing that a transmission line wrapped in a conductor has improved efficiency. He was holding out with the stated goal that he be given "sole credit" for the discovery.
Finally: It is more blessed to give than to receive. Helping on Stack Exchange is giving.
You should at the very least run a limited test of this feature in order to see how it goes and validate some of the assumptions that have been mentioned.
All of of the objections I've seen on this thread and elsewhere sound reasonable, but none of them are good enough to justify writing this feature off entirely without even testing it.
If it worked, it could be an amazing addition to SE, not to mention a minor source of revenue for SE and developers.
People who are desperate for money will abuse the system
Well, sure, people will try. The whole point of SE is that it's very good at detecting and preventing abuse.
The link juice and traffic that SE provides currently is already a massive incentive for abuse, and yet they're able to handle it very well.
The same could be said about point bounties - because they are an enhanced incentive they increase the potential for fraud.
People should answer questions because they're interested in the field not because they are offered money
People respond to incentives. If people are supposed to answer purely and only because of their interest, then why have points and badges in the first place?
Why not just post the question on another freelance project site?
You could say the same thing about SE's resume and job posting services. Why not just use existing services that are out there?
The answer is that SE has an amazing community behind it. The chances that my question will be answered quickly and accurately are simply much higher on SE than basically anywhere else.
Introducing a cash economy into a helping/gratitude economy is usually problematic: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what-they-do/
I don't see how this applies.
What happened in that study is that people basically expected more "service" once they started paying for it. Instead of picking up their kids 20 minutes late, they started picking them up an hour late because now they're paying for it.
I guess the analogy might be that askers would become more lazy with their questions when they were paying for them, because they assume they should get more "service" and not have to spend as much time preparing a well-framed question.
Sure, it's possible that money could decrease the quality of questions, but let's test it to find out.
Again the same could be said about point bounties. Because people are offering a bounty, they'll get lazy about their question and just assume it will be answered because of the bounty. But in fact it's usually the opposite - bountied questions have even more thought put into them, because the asker has more skin in the game.
Same would likely be true for paid bounties.
What if the person doesn't pay?
Seriously? Just do the same thing as what is done for point bounties! Make them pre-pay with no guarantee of getting an answer.
If money was offered, it would feel like work so I wouldn't want to do it in my free time any more.
I don't see why you'd feel less incentivized. Maybe slightly more incentivized but most likely you'd just feel the same. It's not like this would be your day job - who wouldn't want some extra pocket change for something they're already doing for free, particularly when they're creating value for someone else.
At any rate, the number of paid bounties is going to be very low. Kind of like how the occurrence of point bounties is quite rare compared to regular questions.
So the presence of paid bounties likely wouldn't impact 99% of what you're already doing on SE.
Here's the use case that I have in mind. Someone has an urgent situation that they'd be willing to spend $100 or $200 to get resolved right away because it's important.
Sure they could find somebody on elance for that amount. But highly skilled developers aren't going to be available at a moment's notice off of elance, even if you paid market or above market rates.
SE is in a unique position to be able to connect the highly skilled developers who are available within minutes of the question being posted with the people asking the questions who need a quick answer.
And yes, SE already works extremely well to handle exactly this scenario, without any money exchanging hands - which is awesome.
But what if you have a particularly hairy issue and the only answers that you've gotten haven't been fully baked or require additional time to validate that you just don't have at the moment.
You'd be willing to pay $100 or $200 for a rock solid answer that just works. Someone who might normally spend 10 or 15 minutes answering the question now has a little more incentive to go ahead and spend the full 20 or 30 minutes to give that rock solid answer that's needed.
Sure there's the possibility that the developer spends the 30 minutes and then the asker says they didn't feel the quality of the answer was high enough, and so the developer is frustrated by that. But that's an existing problem on the site just with the point system.
People answer questions all the time and don't even get them marked as the answer or upvoted at all. There can be mechanisms to help with this such as the askers rate of marking a question as answered, etc.
1) Up front payment for bounties, questions 2) highly upvoted answers are considered "answered" regardless of whether the asker agrees, 3) site gets 30% to pay mediators that assist with bounty question, etc. etc. 4) bounty questions are segregated in search results, subject to higher levels of scrutiny, etc. 5) minimum payment of $100. quality questions, quality answers only
Commented
Sep 17, 2019 at 21:39
I think it's a lovely idea and makes sense - from a blind point of view of a person asking the question.
But allow me to sum up what others have pointed: the money would corrupt the community.
Picture an eBay for buying rather than selling. You'd auction for what you want to buy, and interested sellers would browse for buyers. There are actually attempts of doing just that on the web.
I think the whole idea is still in the air (even 5 years later now) for someone to bring a good solution to it, eventually. Just not here, please.
You can already do this without modifying the existing stackexchange culture: just refer to it from a HIT in Amazon Mechanical Turk (which suffers from precisely the motivational/behavioral challenges discussed above) https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
I think it's a great idea! What if my reputation run out and I still need the answer?
I see two possibilities here:
The main principle of SE is that we love helping others voluntarily sometimes a lot more than we like to work. Work is brutal and psychologically draining sometimes. We enjoy this charitable behavior. Making SE about money would be like asking a well organized & successful organization staffed (almost) entirely with volunteers, why not charge money and pay salaries? The reason is that the people who have the advanced knowledge you seek already have jobs if they want them and you probably can't/don't want to pay something similar to their hourly rate/income. If you want to scout for affordable freelance work, there are sites for that.
I understand all comments warning that this would corrupt the SE community, but still I think this could be done in a "stealth" way, e.g.: there's already a feature that allows you to put a bounty to a question that has been unanswered; this feature works by subtracting reputation points from your own account to add to the question, but what if there was a second way? adding money instead of points from your reputation (the money would then be kept by S.E., and be converted to normal points).
This would be useful for people that don't want to spend their reputation points in getting more attention to their questions, or for people that simply don't have enough reputation points to promote a question. Bonus points if S.E. allowed cryptocurrency (e.g. litecoin, or lightning-bitcoin, to avoid problems with mining fees) for this feature. And it wouldn't have the problem of corrupting the community because the money cannot be earned by anyone, just earned by the StackExchange platform.
(Last but not least, this is also a way to monetize StackExchange without using ads.)
I WILL PAY TO HAVE CERTAIN QUESTIONS OF MINE ANSWERED WHEN ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY! I think this would be great. Why would it be so bad?????
But, to prevent excessive use of this feature, questions can have a minimum price tag, for example say $25. That way people still answer free questions and not every question is a $1 dollar question that forces other good (free) questions to be ignored.
