Why was Zoe's bounty message removed?

Question

Look at the revisions for Will concerns regarding the move to CC BY-SA 4.0 elicit any further dialogue from Stack Exchange, Inc.?:

A bounty message posted by Zoe the transgirl was removed by an employee (the bounty still could go on). However, looking at a Wayback Machine archive of it, it doesn't seem offensive or anything. Why was the bounty message removed?

An archive with the message:

Will you please just reply already? We need answers. This being ignored will not improve relations between users and the company, nor will it increase your already low trust.

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_{I was originally not linking to the archive because I don't want to get in trouble. However, animuson says it was just a mistake and I’ve thus edited it in.}

Answer 1

I don't know why I never came back and answered this, but it was an honest mistake on my part.

I was trying to lock the deleted answer for various reasons and was trying to remove the post notice because it wasn't relevant. In the process of doing that, I accidentally triggered post notice removal on the question instead of the answer. I didn't notice I had done this until someone pointed it out to me later.

Keep in mind there's also no undo button for bounty messages. There's no undo button for any post notice, but at least with lock reasons you can simply just attach a new lock to the post.

There wasn't anything wrong with the bounty message itself and it wasn't removed for reasons of moderation. If we had found something wrong with the bounty itself, the normal course of action is to just refund the entire bounty, not to only remove the notice.

Answer 2

I'm not one to give up a free bounty.

As per Animuson's comment

It was simply a mistake while fiddling with another answer. – animuson♦ Oct 6 '19 at 17:22

We're mortal, fallible and made of meat.

But that's a boring answer.

While I'm not staff, I'm a moderator here, and at the end of the day, with things like thus, shaping the policies of the site are part of my role.

I'm also not one to pass up on a chance to clarify policy

Will you please just reply already? We need answers. This being ignored will not improve relations between users and the company, nor will it increase your already low trust.

While a bit informal, seems fine to me in general. Its a bit of an odd bounty to earn by the letter of the bounty message but... it reflected the feelings of the community at the time pretty well.

Using bounties to get attention and to try to get an issue resolved faster while, IMO completely pointless, is part of meta culture. There should be no real issue to addressing the company in a mod message.

Essentially - a bounty getting refunded ought to be incredibly rare. If there's a problem with your bounty reason, we ought to be reaching out to you in some way to let you know why the bounty in question was problematic. In the cases where I have, I've personally made an attempt to, and it ought to be best practice.

I've literally never seen a bounty message removed on its own, and there's no neat UI. Seeing how... terrible, some tools ported to mod use from CM use are initially, I can believe the fatfingering). If it was possible, I still do think letting the user know precisely what was wrong from our perspective makes sense.

There have been cases where bounties were used in an attempt to stir up drama, or pillory members of the community and staff - and those are not acceptable.

This wasn't one of them.

Healthy constructive disagreement has always been a pillar of the culture of SE and MSE.

So, if we intentionally remove a bounty, or its associated message, we ought to let you know why. I'd personally go with something private - its an appropriate use of a mod message IMO