My bounty didn't get me an acceptable new answer on an already answered question

Question

Existing, already-answered question: Program for displaying network activity by each app for MacOSX

My own unanswered and closed question: Free program for displaying network bandwidth by each app for MacOSX

The answers to the existing question don't answer in any way the question I am interested in.

Now, I was told here that I just should start a bounty on the already answered question.

I just did that, and the bounty ended without helping me at all. The default when I don't specify any answer — giving it to the answer with the highest score — does not make sense. That answer does not help me at all. None of the answers do help me.

Now I wonder what I should do. I am still waiting for an answer to my question. My question still is closed. To get traction on it, I would have to start another bounty. I am very short with reputation on Super User, so I can't just always do that again and again.

To not lose the reputation senselessly for the first bounty, I thought I would make a dummy answer and give that dummy answer the reputation. That way, I could keep my question open with further bounties until really got answered. That didn't work for some reason. It seems I just lost the reputation. Was that a bug/problem or is this intended?

How should I handle this? Obviously I cannot just always open bounties again and again until I get an answer. So should I just ignore it and go on to another question/answer site where unanswered questions can stay open?

Or maybe the system should be fixed so I can get the reputation back from bounties that didn't get me an answer I wanted.

Answer 1

Since this is becoming a storm in a teacup I am going to make this clear once and for all.

The questions was closed because it was a duplicate off another, and one difference in feature set does not make a question any less a duplicate.

When you set a bounty, you take the risk that someone would be able to provide an answer. Bounties are non refundable and assigning a bounty to your own answer voids the points and you loose them anyway, this is by design.

Considering that you did this, and the answers that were provided to your question before it was closed matches the answers to the question you set a bounty to, have you actually even remotely considered that what your looking for does not exist, and that it cannot be answered?

Also, considering that it only takes 10 good questions or 5 good answers to get back the 50 reputation you lost, is it really that hard to try and contribute further to the site and recuperate the reputation? I am fairly confident you would have made the reputation back already with more participation.

Answer 2

According to the comments and answers here, particularly waffles, once you set the bounty, you lose the rep. Period.