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What is the reasoning for making bountied questions immune to close votes?

I've recently encountered a couple of questions which were a bit mediocre to start with and successive edits over a few days have made them gradually worse. The questions actually became more vague and opinion based with edits apparently contradicting the points which earlier appeared clear / fact based.

I would have ultimately voted to close them, but the OP had by that time put a bounty on them.

I'm curious to know why an OP is allowed to make their question immune to close votes?

I recognise that the bounty system does require users giving up their rep, so they must at least have some to give up and generally more experienced users write better questions. But this link is far from guaranteed.

Edit:

I think my specific issue here is the way a bounty is set by the OP, close votes are administered by the community.

  • Close votes usually supersede the views of the OP. The OP clearly thought their question was fine when they asked it, the community did not.
  • But the OP's bounty supersedes the views of the community.

It seems an odd way around.

I just want to cite this one as an example on Unix SE: How to search OpenStreetMap for tags?

The original question somehow evaded close votes. Perhaps because no-one was interested enough to understand it was asking about how to use a specific website and not anything Linux/Unix specific.

It was rapidly edited and then bountied to ask a bunch of stuff that's much further off topic than the original.

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What is the reasoning for making bountied questions immune to close votes?

Well, the point of a bounty is to attract new answers, and those can't be posted on closed questions.

If you see a bountied question which needs to be closed, flag it for ♦ moderator attention, explaining that you can't use a regular close vote since it's bountied. If they agree with you, they'll cancel the bounty so that the question can be closed.

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    Yes I understand the point of both systems, closing and bounties. Perhaps it would be clearer to frame this is as "why a user's opinion of the value of their own question supersedes the views of the community".
    – Philip Couling
    Jun 8, 2020 at 9:45
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    Well the community had ample time to close the question, as your can't immediately start a bounty. So lack of moderation attention would be the real problem here.
    – Luuklag
    Jun 8, 2020 at 10:15
  • The point of asking questions in the first place is to attract answers, and those can't be posted on closed questions. So, by this logic, why allow closing questions at all?
    – Emil Jeřábek
    Jun 8, 2020 at 10:36
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    @PhilipCouling Three close voters in an entire community is hardly unanimous, it's not even democratic if you think about it. You could have 30 low rep users who see nothing wrong with the question but three hi-rep users who do. Why is placing a bounty superseding the community's principles and opinions? What can happen, and I've seen this played in action, a user gets a DV/negative comments/ 2 CV on a question of theirs, they delete it, the question is undeleted after two days and a bounty is offered. If done frequently then that is abusing the system.
    – Mari-Lou A Слава Україні
    Jun 8, 2020 at 12:32
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    On the other hand, placing a bounty when 4 CVs have already been cast is a bit dodgy. Maybe there should be a cap, no bounty for posts with 4 CV, the author has to wait until one CV expires... I dunno.
    – Mari-Lou A Слава Україні
    Jun 8, 2020 at 12:34
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    Maybe give a fresh window between a bump and a CV lock to give a second chance to closers? I'd love to prioritize about-to-be-bountied questions when rationing closevotes.
    – John Dvorak
    Jun 8, 2020 at 18:52

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