Allow questions to be bountied before two days if they are reviewed as "Leave Open" in the Close Votes queue

Question

The rationale of the 2 days delay before a new question becomes bountiable is that the community requires time to close a not eligible question.

The problem is with it, that the worth of an answer typically decreases a lot, if the bounty appears so much later. The motive to sacrifice a lot of reputation is much more weak, if the results arrive 2-9 days later.

My idea is that the OPs could have a possibility to ask for a community review of their question now.

I think it could be done most effectively in the close/reopen queue:

1. The "start a bounty" link would be visible for the OP on the spot after he asked the question.
2. If he clicks "start a bounty" before the 2 day limit, the bounty wouldn't be started. Instead, a close review would be started for his question (but no close vote entity would be created).
3. If the question wins the vote (= 3 "leave open" votes are collected), then it would become bounty-able on the spot.
4. If the question loses the vote (= 5 "close" votes), it would become closed as usual.

I expect the following results:

• There will be a little bit more close votes.
• There will be much more bounties.
• There will be much more users working hardly, but this time not for privileges, but to collect reputation for bounties.
• There will be less workload on moderators as they wouldn't need to cancel bounties as often, as the questions will be reviewed.

In general, the sites would switch from the current "work for privileges" and "google for knowledge" flavor to "knowledge sharing" direction.

Answer 1

This feature request can be split into two parts:

1. Allow post authors to initiate a Close Votes review manually within two days of posting it
2. Allow bounties to a question earlier than two days if the post gets reviewed as "Leave Open" in the Close Votes queue (irrespective of how it got there)

I disagree with the first request as it is currently proposed. First, I don't know how to implement this in the UI ("just click here to have your question reviewed so you can bounty it earlier!"). I imagine people will click that button not exactly knowing what it does, or to abuse the system. This can clutter the Close Votes queue, and on sites like SO whose queues are massive, this can be a real problem. Also, some authors can get mad because it may take a long time for their post to be reviewed, perhaps even more time than if they had just waited the two days.

Also, there are already ways for the post author to initiate a Close Votes review on their own post, which are not so well known and don't clutter the queue: simply cast a recommend closure flag. Or, if you have 250 rep, cast a close vote. This already has a bit of a mental barrier, as they generally think this increases the likelihood of their question being closed, and if they cast a recommend closure flag and it's reviewed as Leave Open, it will result in a declined flag.

As far as the second suggestion, I do think that if the community has already reviewed a question and decided it's not going to be closed as written before the two days lapse, anyone should be able to bounty it. The intent of the two-day waiting period is to give off-topic questions time to be detected and closed by the community. If the community has already decided not to close it after a full-length close review, there is no reason for any more waiting time.

This should be kept well hidden, though. It shouldn't say "hey, the community decided your question is on-topic so we'll let you bounty it." Instead, it should just subtly add in the bounty option. I think this would be overall less prone to abuse.

I'd also like to mention that the overall suggestion does have some pros: it reduces workload on moderators, because as the questions are being reviewed, they wouldn't need to intervene as often to clear the bounty on off-topic questions that might have slipped through the cracks. But this is outweighed by its huge potential for abuse, as I detailed above.

Answer 2

As Journeyman notes, the waiting period isn't about giving folks time to close the question; we could've just as well allowed closing during bounties.

The bounty system wasn't designed to be a necessary step in getting an answer; if you have to pay to play, the system is fundamentally broken. The goal for bounties was to make answering big, hard, meaty questions a bit more palatable:

We’re hoping the new question bounty will improve answer quality on those tougher questions that aren’t so easy to answer. But they do require a bigger commitment from both the asker and the answerer — you must be willing to slice off a piece of your own reputation and bestow it upon the person who is best able to answer your question.

-- Reputation Bounty for Unanswered Questions

Making it possible to instantly offer a bounty works against that goal; you've given no one time to answer, no one time to ask clarifying questions... Worse, you've deprived yourself the opportunity to review your own question, do a bit more research, and make necessary improvements. As I wrote a while back,

Nothing is stopping someone from answering it during that time, except the nature of the question itself. Have you responded to the comments looking for clarification? Edited in details on what your own research has turned up while you were waiting? Worked to make the description and / or code more concise to encourage more people to read it? Made sure the title actually describes the problem you're trying to solve?

If, in two days of effort, you can neither solve the problem yourself nor find anyone else willing to help, then fine - slap a bounty on it, sweeten the deal that you've already done everything to make as attractive as possible. But if you're sitting on your hands for two days waiting out the waiting period... Then you're wasting your time for nothing.

Answer 3

Its a terrible idea. These things are unrelated. The two day wait is meant to stop people from immediately posting a bounty on a post, and give people a chance to answer. Leave open means the question is not terrible, not that it needs a bounty to be answerable. We'd be chucking questions in the closevote queue cause someone was impatient .

People shouldn't be relying on bounties on new questions - they should be using it for advertising hard questions and the unintended concequence would be a bunch of new users doing this to get answers faster.

I'd also note, bounties being canceled are not that common anyway, so that's not a problem that really needs a solution.