When is awarding bounties considered a misuse of the system?

Question

This question is in response to marmot's leaving of the site as discussed in the comments of this post. Comments are disabled there, so I ask this as a separate question.

In the comments Stefan Kottwitz writes:

To the fact, that you are moving your points to others, thousands already: I saw the answers with the bounties and they are great and deserve appreciation. Why didn't you set the bounties earlier? Just to clarify then: you are now misusing the bounty system to move points massively. That can be considered as gaming the system and reputation manipulation.

I'm actually quite surprised to read this. Bounties to me serve two purposes: Either to raise attention to a question that doesn't have fully satisfying answers yet, or to show appreciation to a certain answer that you consider worth more that just a 10-points-upvote.

Users with a lower reputation score will certainly have to consider more carefully how much points they award as bounty and how often they do to not lose certain site privileges. But users with a 100k and above reputation clearly are able to award extra credits more generously.

While I still hope marmot changes his mind about leaving this site, if he finally decides to do so, I really appreciate that he wants to give back some of his points to others before doing so. I know answering questions shouldn't be about collecting points, but it's sometimes still a bit frustrating when you put a lot of effort or time into solving a problem and writing an answer (usually an old one) that pops up in the recent activity list for a few minutes and then forever vanishes in the depths of the site. It leaves you with that uneasy feeling no one cares about what you have written and the time you have spent on this. Receiving a bounty for such answers will certainly give you extra motivation.

So I really don't follow the insinuation that giving credits to others, especially in this case, could be considered a "reputation manipulation". I can't tell what criteria were considered to award the bounties, all of the answers seem TikZ-related, but it's not that bounties were given to random, low-quality answers or with the intent to push the reputation of certain users. To me the motivation just seemed to be "my credits will disappear after leaving the site, why not giving some of them back to the community before that happens?" That doesn't seem a bad intent to me at all.

@Stefan: Why do you consider the awarding a misuse of the bounty system in this case?
@All moderators: What awarding behavior in general is considered manipulative or a misuse of the system?

Answer 1

The main intention behind the bounties is to reward answers that have done something original. They include, but are not limited to, posts that have lead to new packages or libraries. It is true that most of the bounties were awarded to TikZ posts, and the reason is as simple as the fact that I am a bit more comfortable judging for those whether or not they are a major step forward than for other tags. Also I "earned" most of my points with TikZ related posts, so I just pass these points to other TikZ posts, and IMHO this does not "take away" anything from other tags. Altogether I do not understand at all why one should not be allowed to do that.

P.S. As for the "why now" question: true, the main motivation is that the points will decay once my account is deleted, which was scheduled for August 3. Why would it be "better" to let the points decay than to pass them to others? Let me mention that it is not the case that these are the first bounties I awarded. One bounty of 500 points I remember was to a user who wrote a stellar answer, but after she was done the OP changed the question. Unfortunately, the user seems to have become inactive, yet the discussion why this happened is off-topic here. Nevertheless I'd like to reiterate that the purpose of all these bounties is to acknowledge original codes. And I feel that if there was a general agreement that originality (as opposed to just copying) is something valuable, many problems that surface here and there on meta could be avoided (and the current discussion would never have emerged). But this is just an opinion.

Answer 2

Bounties are great! Showing appreciation to posts by bounties is great!

There are possible ways of bounty fraud, such as

• shifting reputation to another account by bounties a lot
• circular bounties (moving rep point to another account, and that account moves it back, costs zero but a benefit may be visibilty and so gained rep/badges)

What that user now does, I just said it "can be considered as gaming the system and reputation manipulation". I didn't make a charge or an action, I gave a possible view point. So thanks for discussing it!

The only related situation I found is described in a comment by whuber (same link above):

The only similar thing I remember anyone getting away with was a high-rep user who, instead of quitting SE altogether, first shed all his rep with a string of +500 bounties: but there was no quid pro quo there (and I suspect the SE team nullified the effects anyway).

Sounds the same to me, so that user is not the first one having that idea.

The bounty system is very transparent, and reputation changes can also be seen. So, as you refer to that case, until now it's already about 18,000 reputation points the user transferred within days, growing, of about 145.000. Moving points massively, that are already "given up" by initiating the account deletion, doesn't look like normal use of the bounty system to me. In case that effect would be nullified, some users may be sad.