I have noticed this trend on other sites too, but it bothers me most here (not getting into why). There is a particular user or two, who post questions (often riddled with links and specificity). They then post a bounty on it in an attempt to get more attention for this question. Then when the question is answered they do not reward the bounty. Other sites that have had this issue, take action against the person is there anything like that here???
1 Answer
I'm the moderator who handled your flag about this. I've had another look, but my conclusion is the same as what I replied to your flag: I see no evidence of abuse here.
First, see the detailed description of the bounty system. It's designed to fairly directly avoid abuse. Most notably:
- the entire point of the bounty system is to draw attention to the question
- there is no way (short of moderator intervention) for the user to get back the reputation they give as a bounty; all they can do is influence what other user receives the reputation
The user in question has posted at least 40 questions and offered bounties on just five of them; I'd hardly call this serial.
One of them was on a now-deleted question (and I believe the deletion undid the bounty), one was on a question that never received an answer, and three were on questions that do have answers.
Of those three, the first was automatically awarded in full, and two were not automatically awarded because they did not get an answer with a score of 2 before the bounty period ended. One of those got to a score of 2 just barely too late to receive the bounty, and the other is still at a score of 0.
While I'd certainly be happier if every single one of the bounties had been awarded (whether automatically or manually), this does not appear to warrant moderator action. Three instances is by no means enough information for me to conclude that the bounties were somehow offered in bad faith, given that it's ultimately up to the user offering the bounty to decide what answers they'd like to award them to. And for the two unawarded cases which did have answers, we as a community could've caused the bounties to be awarded by upvoting the answers!
If this indeed were a problem, it'd also be a self-correcting one: this user only has enough reputation left to offer one more bounty.
As a side note: some of your question also suggests that you perceive the quality of the questions themselves to be lower than desired. We certainly can take action when a user posts consistently low-quality questions, but that's something we wouldn't generally discuss publicly. I will say that unnecessary links and specificity, while they may be idiosyncratic, are not really a sign of low quality. Far better to be too specific than not specific enough! And if a bounty is actually placed on a low-quality question, we can always decline to answer it, and let the reputation be thrown away.
