Ideas and Implementations of Bounties \ stacker news ~meta

Ideas and Implementations of Bounties

2556 sats \ 22 comments \ @MerryOscar 16 Jun meta

What are some ideas / implementations / critiques / thoughts on various bounty systems people have come across or used?

I would love to learn more about different examples and how they work both in theory and practice.

Maybe @k00b could give a quick overview on the Stacker News bounty system and his thoughts there as a start?

Of course have posted this as a bounty because why not!

10,000 sats paid

MerryOscar's bounties

view all past bounties

491 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 16 Jun

Bounties always get my attention. It seems like they should be a bigger part of SN. At the same time, I've never posted one myself. I'm trying to figure out why.

Zapping is mostly something I do after I read a post or comment. Bounties are kinda like pre-zapping (agreeing to zap before you read) but also not because you don't have to assign the bounty until you are satisfied it has been fulfilled.

I wonder if I haven't done any bounties because it feels more like paying while zapping feels more like tossing some money to a street musician. Paying doesn't feel as good. It's more serious. (I don't think there's anything wrong with paying for a thing, just examining why it feels different than zapping.)

I agree with @Undisciplined and @jasonb that it would be cool if you could find all open bounties in one place (and sort them by value or something). I often give a shot to bounties people post that are in my wheelhouse and I would probably do more of this if there was an easy way to check what bounties are open.

17 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 16 Jun

I've only played around with bounties a couple of times.

I interpret them a little differently. I feel like it's the poster making it known that the answer is especially important to them and they'll zap a good answer much more than the normal amount.

We have several weekly contests that run regularly and could be bounties, but that's just not how they've been organized.

I agree with you, though, about feeling like bounties should be a bigger part of SN.

10.9k sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 16 Jun

As for theory, IMO the biggest concerns are:

people doing the work and not being paid
people not doing the work, or doing poor or partial work, and expecting to be paid

For (1), SN attempts to make a bounty-poster's past bounties visible so that a bounty-doer can determine if the bounty-poster makes good on their bounties. Notes:

We could improve this by giving a bounty-poster an aggregate score like "the pay X% of their bounties"
We take a sybil fee of 10% on paid bounties. While we could remove this, it biases bounty-posters away from doing their own bounties and paying themselves for free (ie cheating and maintaining reputation has a non-zero cost at least).
We do not have a good solution for many people completing the bounty, so we leave it up to the bounty-poster to solve. If we were to help with this, the best top-of-dome idea is letting someone elect themselves as the sole bounty-doer for a time period and have them put up a bond for the right.
We could also have the bounty-poster put up a bond for the right to post a bounty. Then, if they don't elect a winner after enough time has passed, the bond is divided among everyone that attempted the bounty.

For (2), whether the bounty work is done or not is not computer-decidable, because if a computer could determine if work has been done well, the computer would be able to do the work in most cases. Notes:

Our system allows for partial work to be paid, by normal tipping, so that seems okay.
IME This is best solved by being very explicit about the bounty requirements.

The best bounty system I've ever used, which might also be the only one I've used, is the one employed by 99designs. I once had a logo designed with them and IIRC:

they call it a contest and a contest has several rounds
you put up the contest requirements and give the platform the contest prize money in advance
in every round you whittle down the contest participants and give feedback
in the final round, you pick a single or many winners, else all contest participants split the contest prize equally

Given it's a contest, you do tend to get a lot of derivative, low effort work, because contest participants are incentivized to enter multiple contests and not over-index on a single contest. Getting great work done requires a lot of effort specifying requirements and giving very specific feedback at each round.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @MerryOscar OP 17 Jun

Great insights thanks!

I think bounties are so interesting and can be applied to many different products especially if they have native support for sats flow - I have some ideas for Fountain too for example bounties on getting certain episode guests on a show.

The challenge is the complexity involved with getting the incentives right - I definitely think concern 2 is harder to get right.

10 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinAbhi 17 Jun

We could also have the bounty-poster put up a bond for the right to post a bounty. Then, if they don't elect a winner after enough time has passed, the bond is divided among everyone that attempted the bounty

This will boost the morale of the participants taking part in it.

296 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined 16 Jun

It would be nice if there were a more visible way to see what bounties are currently still open. That might attract a new set of stackers. I think there are lots of people looking for ways to earn sats that are less nebulous than trying to post stuff people will like.

I don't think Stacker News has sufficient daily volume to make bounties that worthwhile, in many cases. So, added visibility would help, even if those new adventurers don't show up.

42 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b 16 Jun

We do have /recent/bounties but maybe that’s too hidden.

122 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 16 Jun

I think it needs to be right upfront, if it's going to be a big feature. I'm thinking about how Jobs was up there, when I first joined SN.

42 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 16 Jun

Good point. Not to make the hurdle higher, but I'd like to unify bounties and jobs at some point.

17 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined 16 Jun

I feel like there's a common phase of early stackers where you're desperately searching for ways to stack sats.

That could be an easy group to capture and the veteran stackers could mentor them and beat the shitcoinery out of them.

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @carlosfandango 16 Jun

beat the shitcoinery out of them.

Lol

129 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 16 Jun

I think I already said this some time ago: I will integrate SN bounties with a system of rewarding BTC/LN devs.

Anybody that have a proposal, could post it on SN and people will zap sats to it if is worth it or wanted.

BTC/LN apps devs could post features proposals and the ones that have more sats will be implemented. This will help directly the devs and show which features are more desired by their users.

SN is really underrated in this aspect of pushing BTC apps devs proposals.

Gamify the development of apps.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @jasonb 16 Jun

A while back, I cloned the git repo because I wanted to propose a way to search for all (not just a certain user) unpaid bounties. Alas, my amateur coding skills have not arrived at that level yet. So…I guess here is my solicitation for that feature.

The idea of just doing odd jobs online for trivial amounts of money is appealing for a reason I can’t quite put my finger on. Maybe it’s the fact that the sats are kyc-free. Maybe it’s the hope that one day people will start posting really significant bounties. I don’t know, but I’ve thought for a while now that bounties are one part of stacker news that is fun but hasn’t yet reached its potential.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 16 Jun

Idk, if that would help your purpose.

Recently, I've started prediction pools for Cricket T20 World Cup. I've given options like predicting for winner-runnerup, most runs by a player, max. number of sixes and fours, wickets.

I've also created a pool of all pools where participants have to predict for every match. Here are the links: #558162 #542798

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SatsMate 16 Jun

I would position the bounty on a tiered scale based on the size and impact of the bug. If it could be critical, maybe a 50K sat payout, if it is minor maybe a 5K sat payout.

There are a lot of bug-hunting models out there, but from my view, this one is pretty effective.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @grayruby 16 Jun

I use them to run sports pick 'ems. Very handy way to pay out the winner.

Pick the teams and a tie breaker and the winning submission gets the bounty.

By the way, can you please fix the issue with promoted episodes not paying sats. I am trying to support all these pods that put their sats on the line to get new listeners. I try to listen to at least some of the promoted episode every day but lately have gotten no sats many times. Love fountain, not switching, this is really my only complaint.

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @jakoyoh629 16 Jun

See this

https://stacker.news/recent/bounties

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @DarthCoin 16 Jun

MerryOscar if you do not know, is a main contributor with funds for SN... literally a VC (aka owner of SN).

He just want to see what others think about the existing system of bounties. So sending him a link to all SN bounties is meaningless....

0 sats \ 2 replies \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 16 Jun

I didn’t know that!

105 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 16 Jun

Oscar is an angel investor in SN. “Main contributor with funds,” not to discount his investment that I’m very proud of, is a stretch though.